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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

#191

Post by manquer »

rorylawless wrote: post #176
Someone1234 wrote: post #11

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?

More people spent lot more time learning new tech skills (at every experience level).

The excess time available (less commute or career pause etc) and more interest (much more new opportunities) were probably leading reasons why they spent more time I would imagine.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#192

Post by rfmoz »

Alupis wrote: post #156
shrx wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone could ask a question, an LLM could take a first stab at an answer. The author could correct it or ask further questions, and then the community could fill in when it goes off the rails or can't answer. Isn't this how Quora is supposed to operate?

Maybe my experience is unique - but Quora seems to be largely filled with adverts-posing-as-answers.

Quora, sadly, is a good example of enshittification.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#193

Post by ianbutler »

paganholiday wrote: post #108
ianbutler wrote: post #79

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.

The example wasn't even finding a right answer so I don't see where you got that.. Searching questions/answers on SO can surface correct paths on situations where the LLMs will keep giving you variants of a few wrong solutions, kind of like the toxic duplicate closers.. Ironically, if SO pruned the history to remove all failures to match its community standards then it would have the same problem.

"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."

> "actually answered our questions."

Read carefully.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#194

Post by baud147258 »

vbezhenar wrote: post #68
RomanPushkin wrote: post #23

Many users left because they had had overly strict moderation for posting your questions. I have 6k reputation, multiple gold badges and I will remember StackOverflow as a hostile place to ask a questions, honestly. There were multiple occasions when they actually prevented me from asking, and it was hard to understand what exactly went wrong. To my understanding, I asked totally legit questions, but their asking pol…

It's also was a bit frustrating for me to answer. There was time when I wanted to contribute, but questions that I could answer were very primitive and there were so many people eager to post their answer that it demotivated me and I quickly stopped doing that. Honestly there are too many users and most of them know enough to answer these questions. So participating as "answerer" wasn't fun for me.

I spent a lot of time answering rather primitive questions, but since it was on a narrow topic (Logstash, part of the ELK stack), there wasn't many other people eager to post answers. Though it often ended up with the same type of issues, not necessarily duplicates, but similar enough that I got bored with it.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#195

Post by Dylan16807 »

imiric wrote: post #99
OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #34

LLMs absolutely body-slammed SO, but anyone who was an active contributor knows the company was screwing over existing moderators for years before this. Writing was on the walls

If by "body-slammed" you mean "trained on SO user data while violating the terms of the CC BY-SA license", then sure. In the best case scenario, LLMs might give you the same content you were able to find on SO. In the common scenario, they'll hallucinate an answer and waste your time. What should worry everyone is what system will come after LLMs. Data is being centralized and hoarded by giant corporations, and not s…

> If by "body-slammed" you mean "trained on SO user data while violating the terms of the CC BY-SA license", then sure.

You know that's not what they meant, but why bring up the license here? If they were over the top compliant, attributing every SO answer under every chat, and licensing the LLM output as CC BY-SA, I think we'd still have seen the same shift.

> In the best case scenario, LLMs might give you the same content you were able to find on SO. In the common scenario, they'll hallucinate an answer and waste your time.

Best case it gives you the same level of content, but more customized, and faster.

SO being wrong and wasting your time is also common.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#196

Post by yakattak »

There's no doubt that generally LLMs are better. In addition SO had its issues. That being said I can't help but worry about losing humans asking questions and humans answering questions. The sentimentality aside, if humans aren't posing questions and if humans aren't recommending answers, what are the models going to use?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#197

Post by shawn_w »

wood_spirit wrote: post #57
oezi wrote: post #21

Seems like the exit was very well timed. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/408138/what-will-ha...

Another plausible explanation is that the new owners didn’t develop the community in a good way. Instead of fixing the myriad of issues that were obvious to almost all contributors they instead basically let it die?

The new owners (well, not really new any more) are focused on adding AI to SO because it's the current hotness, and making other changes to try to extract more money that they're completely ignoring the community's issues and objections to their changes, which tend to be half-assed and full of bugs.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#198

Post by EugeneOZ »

f311a wrote: post #116
Someone1234 wrote: post #11

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

People overestimate the impact of toxicity on number of monthly questions. The initial growth was due to missing answers. After some time there is a saturation point where all basic questions are already answered and can be found via Google. If you ask them again they are marked as dups.

That would be true if no new technologies were created every year (even more often).

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#199

Post by EugeneOZ »

w10-1 wrote: post #41

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 messa…

The volume of basic questions is unlimited. There are new technologies every year.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#200

Post by diabllicseagull »

oxag3n wrote: post #159

Are we in the age of all CS problems being solved and everything being invented? Even if so, do LLM incorporate all that knowledge? A lot of my knowledge in CS come from books and lectures, LLMs can shine in that area by scraping all those sources. However SO was less about academic knowledge but more about experience sharing. You won't find recipes for complex problems in books, e.g. how to catch what part of my pro…

it is indeed a shame. if you are doing anything remotely new and novel, which is essential if you want to make a difference in an increasingly competitive field, LLMs confidently leave you with non-working solutions, or sometimes worse they set you on the wrong path.

I had similar worries in the past about indexable forums being replaced by discord servers. the current situation is even worse.

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