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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

#171
post #122
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legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers.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).

To avoid going insane the mindset should be to produce something useful for future readers.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#172

Everyone agrees their community and moderators turned toxic. But why? Was it inevitable that people would turn bitter / jaded after answering questions for years? Was it wrong incentives from StackOverflow itself? The outside tech environment becoming worse? The precipitous decline was already happening long before LLM's dealt the final blow.

Yes, it was intended by SO itself. Basically moderate mercilessly. See posts by Jeff Atwood:

> Avoid asking questions that are subjective, argumentative, or require extended discussion. This is not a discussion board, this is a place for questions that can be answered!

https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/01/04/stack-overflow-where-w...

> Certainly on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange we are very much pro-moderation -- and more so with every passing year.

https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/01/31/the-trouble-with-popul...

> Stack Overflow – like most online communities I’ve studied – naturally trends toward increased strictness over time. It’s primarily a defense mechanism, an immune system of the sort a child develops after first entering school or daycare and being exposed to the wide, wide world of everyday sneezes and coughs with the occasional meningitis outbreak. It isn’t always a pleasant process, but it is, unfortunately, a necessary one if you want to survive. > All the content on the site must exist to serve the mission of learning over entertainment – even if that means making difficult calls about removing some questions and answers that fail to meet those goals, plus or minus 10 percent.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/new-programming-jargon/

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#173

Do I read that correctly — it is close to zero today?! I used to think SO culture was killing it but it really may have been AI after all.

Still a couple thousand away from 0. But yea the double whammy of toxic culture and LLMs did the trick. Decline already set in well before good enough LLMs were available. I wonder how reddit compares, though its ofc pretty different use case there

Reddit is a forum morphed into social media. I usually use "question + reddit" on Google to confirm my suspicions about a subject. It is a place to discuss things rather than find answers. It is extremely politicized (leftist/liberal), but that's a whole other story.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#174

Those saying that StackOverflow became toxic are absolutely correct. But we should not let that be it's legacy. It is IMO still today one of the greatest achievements in terms of open data on the internet. And it's impact on making programming accessible to a large audience cannot be understated.

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Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#175

Interestingly, 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...

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Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#176

They 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

The downward trend seems to start ~2017, and was interrupted by a spike during the early months of COVID-19. I'd be interested to know what drove that jump, perhaps people were less hesitant to post when they were working from home?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#177
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. I often end up on Stack Exchange when researching various engineering-related topics, and I'm always blown away by how incredibly toxic the threads are. We get small glimpses of that on HN, but it was absolutely out of control on Stack Exchange. At the same time, I think there was another factor: at some point, the corpus of answered questions has grown to a point where you no longer needed to ask, because by…

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well you can say all that but it doesn't hold up to experience. The culture feels very different here. So, no, it's not the same.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#178

They 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

Many people are pointing out the toxicity, but the biggest thing that drove me away, especially for specific quantitative questions, was that SO was flat out wrong (and confidently so) on many issues.

It was bad enough that I got back in the habit of buying and building a library of serious reference books because they were the only reliable way to answer detailed technical questions.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#179
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's flat wrong to suggest SO had the right answer all the time, and in fact in my experience for trickier work it was often wrong or missing entirely. LLMs have a better hit rate with me.

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Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#180
I ended up having a high reputation on SO. Not sure why, but it’s over 7000.

I also experienced many of the issues I see described here. The most egregious was when I asked a completely valid question for R: How to fit a curve through a set of points, with each point having an error associated.

This is something completely normal in a physics experiment. Each measurement had its own error interval. But, for people using R, this seemed like something completely new. So, they just downvoted the question and told me I was wrong.

I ended up answering my own question… but was also told that was wrong and that all points must have the same error interval.

Instead of answering a programming question, people just went around denying experimental physics.

I think that was the beginning of the end of SO for me.

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