We – which is to say, you, the Stack Exchange community – had another great year in 2014.
We cracked Quantcast’s top 50 networks in the US. We did this without posting celebrity gossip, top 10 lists, or cat pictures. We did it by creating artifacts: useful, canonical bits of information, edited, refined, and curated by our community.
By donating your knowledge to the largest community of developers in the world, you’ve been able to create a slice of the Internet that is indeed a better place. Amidst the noise, clutter, and chaos of the web, you’ve built one of the largest, most trusted knowledge repositories ever created.
How many times did people looking for help find your solutions last year? If you were to take the number of visitors to Stack Exchange sites in 2014, it would be larger than the populations of the United States, Russia and Brazil combined.
(Accommodating this many visitors would not be possible without our remarkably lean infrastructure, which served 6.4 billion pageviews last year alone.)
By the Numbers
Let’s focus on how much you did in 2014 to share your knowledge:
- 3.1 million new questions asked
- 4.5 million answers submitted
- 2.7 million edits, which made those posts even more helpful
- 17 million comments
- 3.6 million reviews
- 21 million upvotes; 3.2 million downvotes; 1.8 million accepted answers
Community Highlights
- In 2014, we launched 20 new beta sites that you proposed through Area 51, bringing us to a total of 133 communities spanning topics as diverse as Economics, Startups, and Buddhism.
- 5 communities graduated from beta and were fully launched with snazzy new designs: Personal Finance and Money, Graphic Design, Academia, The Workplace, and Salesforce.
- We released native mobile apps for iPhone, Android, and iPad, (with an Android Tablet version in the works). Just a year in, hundreds of thousands of you have installed them, and you’ve posted more than 15K posts from the bathroom mobile apps.
- We launched Portuguese and Japanese Stack Overflows, our first non-English SOs. Portuguese is now officially our second fastest-growing community ever after hitting 10,000 questions in only 9 months.
- Stack Overflow Careers added 3,700 new company pages and 29,000 job listings. Finding a better job should be as easy for developers as finding answers on Stack Overflow.
Content Superlatives
Numbers are fine, but answers are better. Let’s look at some of your top posts from 2014.
- Most viewed post:
- What is the optimal algorithm for the game, 2048? (Stack Overflow, 679k views)
- Honorable mention: Visually stunning math concepts which are easy to explain? (Mathematics, 304k views)
- Most upvoted answer:
- Why is printing “B” dramatically slower than printing “#”? (Stack Overflow, 2109 votes)
- Honorable mention: Why does Windows think that my wireless keyboard is a toaster? (Super User, 1293 votes)
- Most anonymous votes:
- Produce the number 2014 without any numbers in your source code (Code Golf, 997 anonymous upvotes on the linked answer)
More Highlights
- We worked on a lot of open source projects this year, not least bosun, a sophisticated monitoring system.
- _Everything _we’ve achieved is thanks to the generosity of our users, so we’re proud to give back. We donated over $60,000 to some of our favorite projects on behalf of our invaluable moderators.
- We grew to 205 employees here at Stack Exchange (the company), more than 20% of whom work remotely. We now have people in 11 countries with physical offices in New York, London, and Denver. If you want to join us in serving the world’s programmers while building a better, smarter Internet, we’re hiring.
You blew us away last year. Thank you. We can’t wait to see what you’ve got in store for 2015.