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The Fall of Stack Overflow

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Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#591

Post by palata »

leblancfg wrote: post #464
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…

I’d say the peak of Github copilot adoption might have been during that month as well, IIRC the VS Code extension got released late March

Which would make sense, right? You are more likely to get an answer on StackOverflow for questions that touch very common technology (because more people are likely to answer). And that is exactly where Copilot probably shines too (I don't use it): because that is where there is a lot of training data.

I personally used to like StackOverflow as my last recourse: I grew up in those years where we had to RTFM, and I kept the habit. So if I go ask on StackOverflow, it is a tricky question. It used to be fine, and I was getting an answer eventually (sometimes after adding a bounty).

But in the last few years, I have had legit questions downvoted or even closed, and it was obvious that the people voting to close it did not even understand it. I agree that the moderation culture on StackOverflow is toxic. If everytime I contribute something, I have to fight to not get downvoted or closed, then I will slowly stop contributing.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#592

Post by Nonlin »

andirk wrote: post #152
ianmcgowan wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what will ChatGPT 10 be trained on, if no one is posting blog posts, answering questions on stack overflow, or updating Wikipedia? OpenAI will have to change the logo to a snake swallowing its own tail.

We're already losing ton of indexable, searchable content from knowledgeable people due to the content being created and shared via private chatrooms, and now that chat bots can collect a handful of results and put it in a cute spoken language format, I worry that this "information highway" is about to get seriously gate-kept and dwindle into a pay-to-play public library.

Yes that is another problem that may cap AI. If they don't create an AGI.

There was a chatGPT research paper where it could learn from its mistakes and seek novel solutions.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#593

Post by coliveira »

sznio wrote: post #349
JohnMakin wrote: post #109

The problems I’ve noticed with Stack Overflow are a few and hard for me to narrow down but basically: - google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago - moderation on SO has gotten progressively more horrible. can’t tell you how many times I found the exact, bizarre question I was asking only to see one comment trying to answer it and then a mod aggressively sh…

Your first point seems to be most important. > - google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago SO might be horrible now, but it still holds years worth of answers that were just fine a few years ago - so why aren't they showing up now? Google's current recommendation of going to w3schools or - even worse - geeks4geeks or any other content farm is and always wi…

The answer is that the content farms are doing a better job of interacting with Google algorithm than SO. Of course it is a problem with Google search, but search was always hackable. The made-for-google sites know very well how to play the game.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#594

Post by freediver »

madog wrote: post #589
sznio wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first point seems to be most important. > - google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago SO might be horrible now, but it still holds years worth of answers that were just fine a few years ago - so why aren't they showing up now? Google's current recommendation of going to w3schools or - even worse - geeks4geeks or any other content farm is and always wi…

This is what I want from a new search engine: 1. Respect exact match searches - this used to work enclosing the search terms in "" quotes, but no longer works. If there are no exact match results, return nothing. 2. Allow blacklisting or removing results from certain websites entirely e.g. I want to be able to configure geeks4geeks to never show up in any results ever If someone could make this new search engine they…

Both features exactly as described already exist in Kagi search [1] (founder here).

We are not trying to replace Google though, but offer an alternative to people who care so much for the quality of their search experience, that they are willing to pay for it.

[1] https://kagi.com

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#595

Post by AlexandrB »

pjc50 wrote: post #555
XCSme wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it even make sense to serve different content to a bot than what a human would see? Isn't the search engine trying to rank content made for humans?

It's an adversarial process. The search engine is, in theory, trying to rank by usefulness to the user, and the site owner is trying to maximize revenue by lying to the search engine. And the user.

I'm generally puzzled by Google's reluctance to do manual intervention in these cases. It's not like this is a secret. Just penalize the whole domain for 60 days every time a prominent site lies to the crawler.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#596

Post by underdeserver »

lelanthran wrote: post #465
ivanbakel wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And those people can look for questions where the "right way" is justifiably unusable, or pose those questions themselves (and find out if they really have to avoid it.) Because you're answering every person who ever will ask, a lot of the people who pass through your question & answer will be people who don't know the difference between the right way and the wrong way. If they want to know how to do something the wr…

> And those people can look for questions where the "right way" is justifiably unusable, or pose those questions themselves Can't be done, will be marked as duplicate.

This is bad then. They are not duplicate questions.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#597

Post by talonx »

cassepipe wrote: post #571

Well, I must be the only one left to think Stack Overflow is great then. Sure, you may encounter the occasional rough moderator but having to correspond with random people on the internet in writing as my daily job, I can't blame them. If you don't have a rep, it's up to you to gain some by crafting the best question, linking to the relevant docs, transcribing screenshots, correcting typos etc. The only issue with SO…

I think SO remains great for the answers it already has.

The rough moderator problem exists on other SE sites also (source: personal experience) where they are IMO needlessly rude, snarky or dismissive.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#598

Post by [deleted] »

mcv wrote: post #578
cassepipe wrote: post #571

Well, I must be the only one left to think Stack Overflow is great then. Sure, you may encounter the occasional rough moderator but having to correspond with random people on the internet in writing as my daily job, I can't blame them. If you don't have a rep, it's up to you to gain some by crafting the best question, linking to the relevant docs, transcribing screenshots, correcting typos etc. The only issue with SO…

I also think Stackoverflow is great, but to be perfectly honest, I haven't used it much in the past year and a half. And I have no idea why.

[deleted]

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#599

Post by coliveira »

Shrezzing wrote: post #407
sznio wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first point seems to be most important. > - google used to return really relevant results for SO, and it stopped doing so at some point a while ago SO might be horrible now, but it still holds years worth of answers that were just fine a few years ago - so why aren't they showing up now? Google's current recommendation of going to w3schools or - even worse - geeks4geeks or any other content farm is and always wi…

Google is really failing hard in this regard, and I'm fairly sure it's intentional on their part. Searching "Typescript array" has obvious intent from the user, and an obvious "correct" first result. Google returns the documentation page in the 3rd result, but it's a link to a deprecated version of the page. The rest of the above-the-fold links are websites that contain Google ads. Duck-Duck-Go returns the up-to-date…

Yes, google search is nowadays, like everything else, run by AI. What nobody tell is that the AI is trained to maximize Google's revenue. That's why they figured out it is better to put these ad sites on top.

Re: The Fall of Stack Overflow

#600

Post by palata »

kebman wrote: post #436

I used to contribute a lot to Stack Overflow, but then I noticed that I’d get flamed for even asking simple questions; stuff that can really stand between actually getting somewhere with your code, and where a helpful comment could really make a difference. At some point regular replies were replaced by administrators and mods who are seemingly far more interested in finding faults with your question rather than to a…

Same experience: a few months ago I wrote both the question and the answer (I used to do that a lot for tricky things I figured out after a lot of research).

My question got closed, with bullshit reasons. I kept asking to reopen over a few months, just to see what would happen (because clearly it was a good question and a good answer). After 3 months it got voted to be reopen. Since then I got badges for "popular question" and many upvotes there.

Pretty clearly I was closed by people who did not understand the question and probably had not even realized that I had answered it myself.

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