The Fall of Stack Overflow • Hacker News Board

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#61

Post by dleeftink » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 1:45 AM UTC

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #5

Where were these data sourced from? As far as I know, StackOverflow does not publicize internal analytics with such granularity. If these figures are real, are they leaked?

Besides the Archive.org data dump, there is also the Stack Exchange Data Explorer for which there are thousands of user queries[1].

For instance, this user query by Starball tracks network contributions over time[2][3].

[1]: https://data.stackexchange.com/meta.stackexchange/queries

[2]: https://data.stackexchange.com/meta.stackexchange/query/1759...

[3]: Static image if the query times out: https://i.stack.imgur.com/LYZQm.png

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#62

Post by glaucon » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 1:57 AM UTC

brodouevencode wrote: post #34

readingnews wrote: post #3

I was promoted to one of those "mod" type people who reviews new answers, first posts, etc, a few years back. I can tell you that I quit in the last 6 months. All new answers are answers on questions from first time posters, answering questions that have good solid answers from 8+ years ago (mostly 10 years), and it is pretty obvious, they are just doing it to get points. The question/answer is not something that has…

> and it is pretty obvious, they are just doing it to get points Gamifying reputation was one of the worst things we've done. I was part of this in previous positions and after a while it became apparent that it brought out the worst in people. There are better ways of incentivizing usage rather than stupid internet points.

>Gamifying reputation was one of the worst things

Agreed and I don't know this for sure but the points lust, it seems to me, is not limited to questioners and answers, some of the behaviour I've seen from mods seems to be driven by that too.

Just to repeat, I don't know that because I don't know what gets you points but the behaviour is hard to understand otherwise.

I had a question where I had finished with a one word sentence "Thanks." . A mod had removed that part of the question, when I looked at their record they had an awful lot of edits which consisted of similar, tiny, non-substantive changes. It did make me wonder about their motivation.

Anyway, yes, imho gamification not a good idea.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#63

Post by agosta » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 2:01 AM UTC

readingnews wrote: post #3

I was promoted to one of those "mod" type people who reviews new answers, first posts, etc, a few years back. I can tell you that I quit in the last 6 months. All new answers are answers on questions from first time posters, answering questions that have good solid answers from 8+ years ago (mostly 10 years), and it is pretty obvious, they are just doing it to get points. The question/answer is not something that has…

I hear your point and thank you for your service as one. That said, how much do we think this is more attributed to the existence of coding AIs like Co-pilot or ChatGPT. I hardly use stack overflow anymore thanks to OpenAI

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#64

Post by dehrmann » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 2:01 AM UTC

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #59

These figures show an extremely precipitous (and permanent) decline in traffic over the course of a few days in May of 2022 [0], during which the number of daily new visits dropped from ~1M to ~300K, the number of total daily page views dropped from ~20M to ~14M, and the number of daily sessions dropped from ~9.4M to ~6.1M. However, there is no commensurate decrease in posts/votes during the same time period. Posts/v…

Drops like that are either due to how bots are tracked, a Google algo change, or a major internal design change.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#65

Post by elforce002 » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 2:04 AM UTC

This is interesting. So, train llms on "everything", including SO, and then replace "everything", including SO. I think we'll see companies such as google, bing, etc... paying to scrap different websites.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#66

Post by 38 » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 2:09 AM UTC

Stack Overflow banned my character with 100,000 reputation:

https://stackoverflow.com/users/1002260

for FIVE YEARS, because of a rollback war on some of my own answers. some idiot was gaming the system and adding minor punctuation here and there, just to get review points. so yeah, good riddance.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#67

Post by jodrellblank » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 2:11 AM UTC

glaucon wrote: post #62

brodouevencode wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and it is pretty obvious, they are just doing it to get points Gamifying reputation was one of the worst things we've done. I was part of this in previous positions and after a while it became apparent that it brought out the worst in people. There are better ways of incentivizing usage rather than stupid internet points.

>Gamifying reputation was one of the worst things Agreed and I don't know this for sure but the points lust, it seems to me, is not limited to questioners and answers, some of the behaviour I've seen from mods seems to be driven by that too. Just to repeat, I don't know that because I don't know what gets you points but the behaviour is hard to understand otherwise. I had a question where I had finished with a one wo…

> "I had a question where I had finished with a one word sentence "Thanks." . A mod had removed that part of the question, when I looked at their record they had an awful lot of edits which consisted of similar, tiny, non-substantive changes. It did make me wonder about their motivation."

https://stackoverflow.com/help/behavior

"Do not use signature, taglines, greetings, thanks, or other chitchat.

"Every post you make is already “signed” with your standard user card, which links directly back to your user page. Your user page belongs to you, so fill it with information about your interests, links to stuff you’ve worked on, or whatever else you like!"

"Thanks and other statements of appreciation are unnecessary, and, like other chitchat, should not be included."

"If you use signatures, taglines, greetings, thanks, or other chitchat, they will be removed to reduce noise in the questions and answers."

----

Removing it doesn't get the editor any points, they are spending their time cleaning up your question to site standards for no reward at all.

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260776/should-i-rem...

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#68

Post by arcanemachiner » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 2:14 AM UTC

labster wrote: post #54

morkalork wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl is a good example because it's stagnant. Googling Python or Java? If the result is up to date, it's a low quality content farm. If it isn't from a content farm, it's a page from 2008 that is no longer relevant at all!

Perl has TIMTOWTDI as a core principle so most of its users are not going to complain about doing things the “wrong” way.

"There Is More Than One Way To Do It"?

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#69

Post by stainablesteel » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 2:20 AM UTC

really interesting as this isn't like digg or myspace, it was built on information, rather than interaction, and will probably fall like the tower of babel.

but i suppose it will still be a very valuable dataset to anyone looking to train a coding model. its the single most valuable resource that could be archived for one

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#70

Post by 38 » Tue, Jul 25, 2023, 2:21 AM UTC

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #33

"How to do A?" Comment: "You shouldn't do A, it's better to do B" Closed, duplicate of "How to do C". Yeah sure, in the beginning, there were many more basic questions (how to increase number by 1, how to get division remainder, how to check if file exists,...), and if you're coding in Perl, you can still find all the answers... if you're working in python, you'll find answers for python2, some for python3, some spec…

> Closed, duplicate of "How to do C".

ouch. as a former user of 10 years, I felt that. so true.