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Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

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Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#31

Post by laichzeit0 »

Some of my most recent ChatGPT interactions:

    34.223.203.0/28 what is the end ip of this range?

    Write python code to strip out characters that are not alphanumeric or spaces

    How do make FastAPI not return nulls in the response model when values don't exist?

    Rewrite this javascript to python
Braindead stuff that I would normally lookup on StackOverflow but ChatGPT gives me the actual answer instead of me having to sift through comments. Also the last one is not something that's suited to StackOverflow. I feel I may be getting dumber, but also programming is not all that interesting to me that I would care to remember the details of any of these things.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#32

Post by dweekly »

I should've been a great fit for stack exchange. I love technical communities and have been writing code for several decades. But they did not have a particularly welcoming experience for new contributors (perhaps by design?) so I wasn't ever really able to get the flywheel started and never ended up contributing much.

I wonder if there's a systems lesson to be learned here around communities that do a good job welcoming new people and creating a magical onboarding experience staying vibrant for longer.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#33

Post by valine »

gostsamo wrote: post #14
duxup wrote: post #5

That was a really interesting. I do worry about the effect of sort of aggregating forces impact on places where content is created. We've seen it with news and etc already. Having said that with Stack Overflow the real reason I hit ChatGPT first in many cases is FRICTION. The UI, the users, the answers that are technically correct but "weird". It's a lot of filtering I have to do as a user that I don't do with ChatGP…

You can generalize it to every market where the proxy owns the relationship with the client and captures the generated value. UI or whatever, if ChatGPT kills Stack Overflow, we will be in a situation where the shared knowledge will be at the level of 2021 and everything later will be with declining quality due to lack of data. I'd say that it is in OpenAI's interest to pay for SO and Redit so that they don't kill th…

You’re assuming the bulk of ChatGPT’s coding knowledge comes from stack overflow. I suspect training directly on code bases and documentation is more important.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#34

Post by WindyLakeReturn »

i80and wrote: post #12
veave wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don't think there's a polite way to put this, but to be honest this comment is an excellent example of what the parent is talking about. All companies have needs that engineers tend to be very poor at, and if the engineers are dominant and see the other members of the organization as parasites, that's a serious dysfunction and not by any means "normal".

Is there anything really special happening here? For a non-technical individual, it can be hard to tell when someone technical is providing value and when they are, to use the term in this post chain, being a parasite. A technical person has the same issues with non-technical people. I've seen different non-technical business areas have this issue with other non-technical areas. I've read reports where supposedly entire departments were cut and the result was that they mostly parasites and the business did better after losing them, along with times such a decision killed a company.

I'm not sure there is anything really special with engineers in this situation. It seems like one of many varieties of the same problem with telling who is producing value and who is faking the appearance of producing value.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#35

Post by anamexis »

shriek wrote: post #17
duxup wrote: post #5

That was a really interesting. I do worry about the effect of sort of aggregating forces impact on places where content is created. We've seen it with news and etc already. Having said that with Stack Overflow the real reason I hit ChatGPT first in many cases is FRICTION. The UI, the users, the answers that are technically correct but "weird". It's a lot of filtering I have to do as a user that I don't do with ChatGP…

> the answers that are technically correct but "weird" In ChatGPT's instance they can be downright wrong and I have to verify if what it's saying is indeed correct on many occasions.

I don't find this to be the case for answers I would otherwise be getting from Stack Overflow. I don't think I've experienced ChatGPT being incorrect about these kinds of straightforward programming questions.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#36

Post by duxup »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #28
duxup wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT at least seems like it is trying to help me. The meta games going on in SO are a whole lot more of a mess and ChatGPT is more than happy to hear my question a 3rd time and spit out the same answer as before but change a few things. SO, not so much.

I use chatgpt as a rubber duck who I’m suspicious of. Way too often it just comes up with fictional features

I get wrong answers too, but they're pretty easy to figure out fast and if I rephrase I get what I need.

It's not like I'm not validating SO answers, there's not any extra steps from my SO experience. Also SO likes to give oddly, technically correct, but also hard to work with code sometimes to the point of being unusable and I take someone else's example anyway. ChatGPT is really good at making super generic answers and quick iterations / alterations.

ChatGPT's power is often in the "conversation" where I add or take things away or change things "I need to break out X,Y,Z before I render it because..." and blamo I get new code. SO has none of that.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#38

Post by D13Fd »

discors wrote: post #16

From my experience, interacting with stack overflow and other software related sister communities has always left a bitter taste in my mouth. Ignoring the elephant in the room that I do use SO everyday with some success, but it’s mostly replaced by ChatGPT. The ridiculous (IMHO) moderation under the guise of “we have only one purpose” often didn’t even align with that goal. The writing was on the wall. So many questi…

Yeah their moderation is awful. So many times, I've found my exact question with a "closed, duplicate of x" note, where "x" is not my question at all and is entirely unhelpful to me.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#40

Post by TheRealPomax »

Looking at that graph though, what it tells me is that stackoverflow was entirely unaffected by ChatGPT, and the giant spike is just humanity collectively jumping on ChatGPT in addition to folks using Stackoverflow in exactly the same way as before?

Same for that "answers over time" graph: that's literally what you'd expect for a knowledge base. There has to be an initial trend upwards as the site starts to accumulate information (i.e. questions with answers, not just questions) and initially gains popularity as a place to get help by asking questions. But, as the number of questions and answers increases, the utility changes from a place to "get help by asking questions" to "a place to get help by searching for answers". At that point, the curve levels off, and as the number of typical beginner and intermediate questions die off because they've already been asked and answered many times, the number of new questions has to trend downward. It'll be slow, because we're constantly inventing new programming languages, libraries, frameworks, etc, but the majority of questions for those are simply duplicates of things asked about previous languages, libraries, and frameworks, with their answers being perfectly usable by folks looking for answers.

And this is exactly the graph we see: rather than a sign of decline, it's a graph that shows the change from a predominantly Q&A site to predominantly being a knowledge repository.

ChatGPT will, of course, have some impact on the graph, but the number of posts on Stackoverflow today that are "How do I X? I asked ChatGPT but that didn't help me" is staggering. ChatGPT may have initially driven down searches across the rest of the web, from Google to Stackoverflow to your mom's recipe website, but the novelty's already worn off, and overall it's done precious little to cut into the utility of Stackoverflow, as far as this data suggests.

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