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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

#241

Post by parpfish »

Alupis wrote: post #107
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.

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…

Also: the bigger the corpus of already answered questions, it’s more likely that you can just look up an answer instead of asking.

Eventually SO becomes a site exclusively for lurkers instead of a platform for active participation

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#242

Post by dpkirchner »

specproc wrote: post #145
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 (…

What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters. LLMs give one answer, or bullet points around a theme, or just dump a load of code in your IDE. SO gives a debate, in which the finer points of an issue are thrashed out, with the best answers (by and large) floating to the top. SO, at its best, is numerous highly-experienced and intelligent humans trying to demonstrate how clever they are. A bit l…

I don't know if this is still the case but back in the day people would often redirect comments to some stackoverflow chat feature, the links to which would always return 404 not found errors.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#244

Post by neillyons »

stirfish wrote: post #219
zero_shift wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. D…

How do I add a second spout to this can? ... Well, the pump at the gas station doesn't fit in my car, but they sold me a can with a spout that fits in my car. ... It's tedious to fill the can a dozen times when I just want to fill up my gas tank. Can you help me or not? ... I understand, but I already bought the can. I don't need the "perfect" way to fill a gas tank, I just want to go home.

My favourite is this disclaimer in the question. lol

> Is there any way to force install a pip python package ignoring all its dependencies that cannot be satisfied?

> (I don't care how "wrong" it is to do so, I just need to do it, any logic and reasoning aside...)

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12759761/pip-force-insta...

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#245

Post by Quarrelsome »

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…

25k here, stopped posting cause you'd spend 10m on a reply to a question just to have the question closed on you by some mod trying to make everything neat.

Maybe it was a culture clash but I came from newsgroups where the issue was is that someone needed help. However SO had the idea that the person who needed help wasn't as important as the normalisation of the dataset.

I sometimes wonder how much time I could have saved for those whose questions got closed before I could answer them. But yeah, that and the swearing culture clash were issues I struggled with, and ultimately meant I stopped contributing.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#246

Post by why-o-why »

palata wrote: post #32
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.

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.

And you can't delete your post when you realize how awful it was years later! That anti-information sticks around for ages. Even worse when there are bad answers attached to it, too.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#247

Post by zellyn »

0xfaded wrote: post #225

I once published a method for finding the closest distance between an ellipse and a point on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g... I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations. People used to reach out to me all the time with…

Please, start a blog! Hugo + GitHub hosting makes it laughably simple. (Or pick a different stack; that’s just mine.)

Even if you’re worried it’ll be sparse and crappy, isn’t an Internet full of idiosyncratic personal blogs what we all want?

If you want help or encouragement, reach out: zellyn@ most places

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#248

Post by why-o-why »

Alupis wrote: post #107
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.

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…

Wasn't there a "bounty" program where if it had a lot of views but no answers, the answer rewarded more internet ego points?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#250

Post by dpkirchner »

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

I wonder if we can attribute some $billion of the investment in LLMs directly to the toxicity on StackOverflow.
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