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Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

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Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#41

Post by w10-1 »

While AI might have amplified the end, the drop-off preceded significant AI usage for coding.

So some possible reasons:

- Success: all the basic questions were answered, and the complex questions are hard to ask.

- Ownership: In its heyday, projects used SoF for their support channel because it meant they don't have to answer twice. Now projects prefer to isolate dependencies to github and not lose control over messaging to over-eager users.

- Incentives: Good SoF karma was a distinguishing feature in employment searches. Now it wouldn't make a difference, and is viewed as being too easy to scam

- Demand: Fewer new projects. We're past the days of Javascript and devops churn.

- Community: tight job markets make people less community-oriented

Some non-reasons:

- Competition (aside from AI at the end): SoF pretty much killed the competition in that niche (kind of like craigslist).

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#42

Post by Avicebron »

Are there any publicly available options to actually interact with real people about software development anymore? There doesn't seem to be anywhere that's accessible with something like a google search... Sure there are derelict IRC/Discord/$language forums, but of the handful I've been part of they aren't active or in the case of discord, weirdly disjointed.

AI is great and all, but somewhere with a little bit of an opinion and push back to carelessly thrown out questions would be nice (as a thrower of careless questions).

SO obviously went off the toxic deep end, but has that culture of shared problem solving just died completely online?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#43

Post by IshKebab »

They're desperately trying to save it e.g. by introducing "discussions" which are just questions that would normally have been closed. The first one I saw, the first reply was "this should have been a question instead of a discussion".

Let's never forget that Stackoverflow was killed by its mods. Sure, it needed AI as an alternative so people could actually leave, but the thing that actually pushed them away was the mods.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#45

Post by antisthenes »

porcoda wrote: post #13

Not a big surprise once LLMs came along: stack overflow developed some pretty unpleasant traits over time. Everything from legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers. For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.

Yep, LLMs are perfect for the "quick buy annoying to answer 500 times" questions about writing a short script, or configuring something, or using the right combination of command line parameters.

Quicker than searching the entirety of Google results and none of the attitude.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#46

Post by jonahss »

porcoda wrote: post #13

Not a big surprise once LLMs came along: stack overflow developed some pretty unpleasant traits over time. Everything from legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers. For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.

It seemed to me that pre-llm, google had stopped surfacing stackoverflow answers in search results.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#47

Post by adrum »

porcoda wrote: post #13

Not a big surprise once LLMs came along: stack overflow developed some pretty unpleasant traits over time. Everything from legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers. For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.

I also wonder if GitHub Discussions was also a (minor) contributing factor to the decline. I recall myself using GitHub Discussions more and more when it came to repo specific issues.

The timeline also matches:

https://github.blog/changelog/2020-12-08-github-discussions-...

https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-discus...

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#48

Post by hdgvhicv »

porcoda wrote: post #13

Not a big surprise once LLMs came along: stack overflow developed some pretty unpleasant traits over time. Everything from legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers. For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.

> For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.

For now. They still need to be enshitted.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#49

Post by etamponi »

I spent the last 14 days chasing an issue with a Spark transform. Gemini and Claude were exceptionally good at giving me answers that looked perfectly reasonable: none of them worked, they were almost always completely off-road.

Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc in the Spark (actually Iceberg) website that gave me the final fix.

This is to say that LLMs might be more friendly. But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions.

Not sure why someone is thinking this is a good thing.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#50

Post by fooker »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #48
porcoda wrote: post #13

Not a big surprise once LLMs came along: stack overflow developed some pretty unpleasant traits over time. Everything from legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers. For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.

> For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better. For now. They still need to be enshitted.

Yeah just wait for the ads
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