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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

#161

Post by zero_shift »

Salgat wrote: post #122
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legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers.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.

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).

Oh I love that game! (At least I think it's a game)

You ask how to do X.

Member M asks why you want to do X.

Because you want to do Y.

Well!? why do you want to do Y??

Because Y is on T and you can't do K so you need a Z

Well! Well! Why do you even use Z?? Clearly J is the way it is now recommended!

Because Z doesn't work on a FIPS environment.

...

Can you help me?

...

I just spent 15 minutes explaining X, Y and Z. Do you have any help?

...(crickets)

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#163

Post by bluedino »

etamponi wrote: post #49

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 (…

There are so many "great" answers on StackOverflow. Giving the why and not just the answer.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#164

Post by gfhifd42 »

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legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers.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 doesn't have anything to do with LLMs. It has to do with shifting one's focus from doing good things to making money. Joel did that, and SO failed because of it.

Joel promised the answering community he wouldn't sell SO out from under them, but then he did.

And so the toxicity at the top trickled down into the community.

Those with integrity left the community and only toxic, selfcentered people remained to destroy what was left in effort to salvage what little there was left for themselves.

Mods didn't dupe questions to help the community. They did it to keep their own answers at the top on the rankings.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#165

Post by fabian2k »

echelon wrote: post #151
fabian2k wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fixing loads of LLM-generated content is neither easy nor fun. You'll have a very hard time getting people to do that.

Hardly. - A huge number of developers will want to use such a tool. Many of them are already using AI in a "single player" experience mode. - 80% of the answers will be correct when one-shot for questions of moderate difficulty. - The long tail of "corrector" / "wiki gardening" / pedantic types fill fix the errors. Especially if you gamify it. Just because someone doesn't like AI doesn't mean the majority share the s…

People answer on SO because it's fun. Why should they spend their time fixing AI answers?

It's very tedious as the kind of mistakes LLMs make can be rather subtle and AI can generate a lot of text very fast. It's a sisyphean taks, I doubt enough people would do it.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#167

Post by stavros »

esafak wrote: post #67
hdgvhicv wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Models are check-pointed. You can save one you like and use it forever.

Doesn't help when the ads are a layer above the model.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#168

Post by bachmeier »

A lesson can be learned here. If you don't introduce some form of accountability for everyone that influences the product, it eventually falls apart. The problem, as we all know now, is that the moderators screwed things up, and there were no guardrails in place to stop them from killing the site. A small number of very unqualified moderators vandalized the place and nobody with common sense stepped in to put an end to it.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#169

Post by porcoda »

ivewonyoung wrote: post #83
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 But LLMs get their answers from StackOverflow and similar places being used as the source material. As those start getting outdated because of lack of activity, LLMs won't have the source material to answer questions properly.

I regularly use Claude and friends where I ask it to use the web to look at specific GitHub repos or documentation to ask about current versions of things. The “LLMs just get their info from stack overflow” trope from the GPT-3 days is long dead - they’re pretty good at getting info that is very up to date by using tools to access the web. In some cases I just upload bits and pieces from a library along with my question if it’s particularly obscure or something home grown, and they do quite well with that too. Yes, they do get it wrong sometimes - just like stack overflow did too.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#170

Post by econ »

lysace wrote: post #93
palata wrote: post #32

Earlier 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.

Gen 0: expertsexchange.com, later experts-exchange.com (1996) Gen 1: stackoverflow.com (2008) Gen 2: chatgpt.com (2022, sort of)

Yahoo answers

Google answers

And the horrific Quora

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