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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

#311

Post by ehnto »

djfergus wrote: post #235
specproc wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think this is something that LLMs can ever replicate. They don't have the egos and they certainly don't have the experience Interesting question - the result is just words so surely a LLM can simulate an ego. Feed it the Linux kernel mailing list? Isn’t back and forth exactly what the new MoE thinking models attempt to simulate? And if they don’t have the experience that is just a question of tokens?

SO was somewhere people put their hard won experience into words, that an LLM could train on.

That won't be happening anymore, neither on SO or elsewhere. So all this hard won experience, from actually doing real work, will be inaccessible to the LLMs. For modern technologies and problems I suspect it will be a notably worse experience when using an LLM than working with older technologies.

It's already true for example, when using the Godot game engine instead of Unity. LLMs constantly confuse what you're trying to do with Unity problems, offer Unity based code solutions etc.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#312

Post by agentifysh »

junto wrote: post #302

I joined Stackoverflow early on since it had a prevalence towards .NET and I’ve been working with Microsoft web technologies since the mid 90’s. My SO account is coming up to 17 years old and I have nearly 15,000 points, 15 gold badges, including 11 famous questions and similar famous answer badges, also 100 silver and 150 bronze. I spent far much time on that site in the early days, but through it, I also thoroughly…

i've been using SO for 17 years as well but ultimately gave up out of frustration, and a lot of comments here are correctly pointing at the toxicity but the real-time chats were on a next level, it was absolutely maddening how toxic and aggressive these moderators were.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#313

Post by Bratmon »

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.

Really? I thought you could only do that with open source models. Can you teach me how to checkpoint the current version of Claude Code so I can keep it as-is forever?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#314

Post by cornel_io »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #258
omneity wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinking from first principles, a large part of the content on stack overflow comes from the practical experience and battle scars worn by developers sharing them with others and cross-curating approaches. Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc. It will be this shared interlocutor with vast swaths of experiential knowled…

Am I the only one that sees this as a hellscape? No longer interacting with your peers but an LLM instead? The knowledge centralized via telemetry and spying on every user’s every interaction and only available thru a enshitified subscription to a model that’s been trained on this stolen data?

Asking questions on SO was an exercise in frustration, not "interacting with peers". I've never once had a productive interaction there, everything I've ever asked was either closed for dumb reasons or not answered at all. The library of past answers was more useful, but fell off hard for more recent tech, I assume because people all were having the same frustrations as I was and just stopped going there to ask anything.

I have plenty of real peers I interact with, I do not need that noise when I just need a quick answer to a technical question. LLMs are fantastic for this use case.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#315

Post by jmux »

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…

This is a really method for solving that problem! I wouldn’t have thought to use the tangents but that makes perfect sense

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#316

Post by HumblyTossed »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #296
erikig wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The various admonitions to publish to a personal blog, while encouraging, don't really get at the 0xfaded's request which I'd summarize as follows: With no one asking questions these technical questions publicly, where, how and on what public platform will technical people find the problems that need solving so they can exercise their creativity for the benefit of all?

Seriously where will we get this info anymore? I’ve depended on it for decades. No matter how obscure, I could always find a community that was talking about something I needed solved. I feel like that’s getting harder and harder every year. The balkanization of the Internet + garbage AI slop blogs overwhelming the clearly declining Google is a huge problem.

Usenet?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#317

Post by gwern »

braiamp wrote: post #269

Actual analysts here that have looked at this graph like... a lot, so let me contextualize certain themes that tend to crop up from these: - The reduction of questions over time is asymptomatic of SO. When you have a library of every question asked, at some point, you asked most of the easy questions. Have a novel question becomes hard. - This graph is using the Posts table, not PostsWithDeleted. So, it only tells yo…

> which while describes a curve that shows the same behavior, it's more "accurate" of the actual post creation.

I would say that this graph looks a lot more extreme, actually!

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#318

Post by downboots »

999900000999 wrote: post #212

Good. This is what Stack Overflow wanted. They ban anyone who asks stupid questions, if not marking everything off topic. LLMs are a solid first response for new users, with Reddit being a nice backup.

Makes for a good conspiracy theory. Bad actors intentionally making the internet hostile. https://youtu.be/qOTYgcdNrXE

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#319

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #198
f311a wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You do not find the 2009 jQuery answer satisfying?
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