What is the best time to ask questions?

Question

What's the best time of day, or weekday, to ask questions on Stack Overflow? I'd like to know if there might be a way to maximize the exposure or the amount/quality of responses.

At the very least, it would be good to know how to avoid times that might be particularly bad to post.

Answer 1

See the blog for activity over time against GMT (back in January 2009):

You might also want to look at Jon Skeet's schedule ;-p (deleted 10k only)

Answer 2

It may be the case that the time you post does not significantly affect the total number of views it gets. Think about the front page exposure, for example: on a particularly busy moment your question spends less time on the front page than it would at a quieter time, so I'm not sure posting at a active moment helps that much.

Now, to maximise the amount of answers early on (which leads to more exposure on front page, and, in many cases, to very high-quality answers eventually, as people compete honing their answers), follow these guidelines: ;-)

• the topic shouldn't be anything obscure (preferably about C# or Java)
• the question should be pretty easy (e.g. "Why isn't there a get(index) method in a Set")
• the question might be ever so slightly provocative or controversial

(I'm not too serious about that, but it is a fact that more difficult questions, or ones concerning a little less-trodden topics, are often left without that many views, or any good answers.)

Answer 3

Data.SE queries show the best time to ask questions according to different definitions of "the best":

Question and answer activity on StackExchange: Interactive and customized edition

For a week-long period, the answers look like these:

Answer 4

For most questions, I don't think there's such thing as a best time. As others have stated, the moment there are many users online to answer questions, there are also more users online to ask questions, and it all evens out in the end.

Here is a little SEDE query illustrating that. The horizontal axis is the number of hours since Sunday 12am UTC. I've normalized the data a little bit:

• outliers, questions with more than twice the standard deviation away from the average (often Hot Network Questions), are not considered when it comes to average view counts
• 'rate of acceptance' means the percentage of questions which has an accepted answer (so it's between 30% and 40%)
• the other numbers are compared against the 'best' bucket, so the highest value is always 1. If that would equate with 1000 views and 2000 questions, a value of 0.5 would mean 500 views or 1000 questions.

This is how it looks like for 2022 Q1 on Stack Overflow. Except for the number of questions, which peaks on weekdays a few hours after UTC noon, there isn't any clear pattern. You can change the parameters to check other periods, or use the site switcher to run it on another site, but I doubt that would make much of a difference. It's best not to use last month's data, as those questions haven't really matured.

That said, if you know you've got potential Hot Network Question material in your hands and want maximum exposure, it's best to post it on Sunday. But as my graph there shows, that only matters for about 1% of all questions.