Between 2017 and 2022 (pre-LLM), it appears to show a clear downward trend, ignoring the covid surge. Any ideas why this might be?
The query also filters to PostTypeId = 1, what does this refer to?
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
121–130 of 1001 posts
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#122Not 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legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers.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.
Seemed like for every other question, I received unsolicited advice telling me how I shouldn't be doing it this way, only for me to have to explain why I wanted to do it this way (with silence from them).
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#123Not 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legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers.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.
Agreed. I personally stopped contributing to StackOverflow before LLMs, because of the toxic moderation. Now with LLMs, I can't remember the last time I visited StackOverflow.
The same is true for reddit imo, it became impossible to post anything to a subreddit way before LLMs
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#124I wonder what the April 2020 spike is about... maybe lockdowns meant people started learning new stuff?
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#125Interestingly, stagnation started around 2014 (in the number of questions asked no longer rising,) and a visible decline started in 2020 [1]: two years before ChatGPT launched!
It’s an interesting question if the decline would have happened regardless of LLMs, just slower?
[1] An annotated visualization of the same data I did: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/are-llms-making-stackover...
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#126They will no doubt blame this on AI, somehow (ChatGPT release: late 2022, decline start: mid 2020), instead of the toxicity of the community and the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design. PS - This comment is closed as a [duplicate] of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482620
It is sort of because of AI - it provided a way of escaping StackOverflow's toxicity!
Could view it as push/pull dynamics: pushed away by toxicity, pulled to good answers from AI.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#127Not 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.
How can we be sure that LLMs won't start giving stale answers?
They will, but model updates and competition help solve the problem. If people find that Claude consistently gives better/more relevant answers over GPT, for example, people will choose the better model.
The worst thing with Q/A sites isn't they don't work. It's that they there are no alternatives to stackoverflow. Some of the most upvoted answers on stackoverflow prove that it can work well in many cases, but too bad most other times it doesn't.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I personally stopped contributing to StackOverflow before LLMs, because of the toxic moderation. Now with LLMs, I can't remember the last time I visited StackOverflow.
People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is. The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. Meanwhile, "how do I concat a string" gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes. The incentive/reward structure punished experienced folks with chal…
>toxic moderation and trigger-happy close-votes
>zombie community
Like Reddit post 2015.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#129Not 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.
That depends on what you mean by "came along". If you mean "once that everyone got around to the idea that LLMs were going to be good at this thing" then sure, but it was not long ago that the majority of people around here were very skeptical of the idea that LLMs would ever be any good at coding.
That's because there has been rapid improvement by LLMs.
Their tendency to bullshit is still an issue, but if one maintains a healthy skepticism and uses a bit of logic it can be managed. The problematic uses are where they are used without any real supervision.
Enabling human learning is a natural strength for LLMs and works fine since learning tends to be multifaceted and the information received tends to be put to a test as a part of the process.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#130I guess I'm the only one that was a fan of SO's moderation. I never got too deep into it (answered some TypeScript questions). But the intention to reduce duped questions made a lot of sense to me. I like the idea of a "living document" where energy is focused on updating and improving answers to old versions of the same question. As a user looking for answers it means I can worry less about finding some other variation of the same question that has a more useful answer
I understand some eggs got cracked along the way to making this omelette but overall I'd say about 90% of the time I clicked on a SO link I was rewarded with the answer I was looking for.
Just my two cents