While SO is mostly dead, narrower stackexchange communities may be very much alive. E.g. the Emacs community is responsive.
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
321–330 of 1001 posts
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is. This is literally not true. The rate you learn and encounter new things depends on many things: you, your mood, your energy etc. But not on the amount of your experience. > The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue a…
I don't know what your experience has been, but I do feel that at some point you will find yourself on or beyond SO's "knowledge frontier".
The questions you land on will be unanswered or have equally confused replies; or you might be the one who's asking a question instead.
I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself, but it felt quite thankless since even the original poster would disappear, and anyone who found my answer from Google wouldn't be able to give me an upvote either.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#323I 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…
You can write a paper, submit the arxiv, and you can also make a blog post. At any rate, I agree - SO was (is?) a wonderful place for this kind of thing. I once had a professor mention that they knew me from SO because I posted a few underhanded tricks to prevent an EKF from "going singular" in production. That kind of community is going to be hard to replace, but SO isnt going anywhere, you can still ask a question…
I would imagine the endorsement requirement reduces submissions by a few orders of magnitude.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#324Earlier 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…
To be fair, asking why someone wants to do something is often a good question. Especially in places like StackOverflow where the people asking questions are often inexperienced. I see it all the time professionally too. People ask "how do I do X" and I tell them. Then later on I find out that the reason they're asking is because they went down a whole rabbit hole they didn't need to go down. An analogy I like is imag…
>I see it all the time professionally too. People ask "how do I do X" and I tell them. Then later on I find out that the reason they're asking is because they went down a whole rabbit hole they didn't need to go down.
Yep. The magic question is "what are you trying to accomplish?". Oftentimes people lacking experience think they know the best way to get the results they're after and aren't aware of the more efficient ways someone with more experience might go about solving their problem.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#325Some comments: - This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when Encyclopædia Britannica stopped selling print versions a mere 9 years after the publication of Wikipedia, but at an even faster timescale. - I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor mode…
> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question I read an interview once with one of the founders of SO. They said the main value stackoverflow provided wasn't to the person who asked the question. It was for the person who googled it later and found the answer. This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. They were pr…
LLMs also search Google for answers. Hence the knowledge may be not lost even for those who only supervises machines that write code.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#326Actual 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…
At my place of work we use an indexing service for discord that creates an index of searchable static pages for all discord interactions.
So while I agree the help desk style system isn’t really better it also doesn’t necessarily mean that it is lost forever in a silo.
Before you ask, we use https://www.linen.dev/ but I’m sure there are other similar solutions by now
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#327I 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…
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?
> The various admonitions to publish to a personal blog, while encouraging, don't really get at the 0xfaded's request
They also completely missed the fact that 0xfaded did write a blog post and it’s linked in the second sentence of the SO post.
> There is a relatively simple numerical method with better convergence than Newtons Method. I have a blog post about why it works http://wet-robots.ghost.io/simple-method-for-distance-to-ell...
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#328I 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
> Please, start a blog!
The second sentence of the SO post is a link to their blog where it was posted originally. The blog is not a replacement for the function SO served.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#329Seems like there are "blocked by cloudflare" number of questions per month. Their blocking of everyone not using chrome/etc from accessing their website probably contributed quite a bit to the implied downturn I'm reading in other comments.
Even if you get on the site you'll end up dealing with Cloudflare's BBBaaS (breaking back buttons as a service).
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 anyth…
this right here, not just overmoderated but the mods were wrong-headed from the start believing that it was more important to protect some sacred archive than for users to have good experiences.
SO was so elite it basically committed suicide rather than let the influx of noobs and their noob questions and noob answers kill the site
this nails it: https://www.tiktok.com/@techroastshow/video/7518116912623045...