We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
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Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#2I'm surprised at how non-obvious LLMs are for that decline chart. SO peaking in 2014 is not what I would have expected.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#3I'm surprised at how non-obvious LLMs are for that decline chart. SO peaking in 2014 is not what I would have expected.
Me too. It does appear a bit more dramatic around when LLMs hit the scene but the was already a clear peak/decline starting well before.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#4I'm surprised at how non-obvious LLMs are for that decline chart. SO peaking in 2014 is not what I would have expected.
It may just feel that way because we're less likely to look at SO directly now that there are better alternatives.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#5Related: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time (1526 points, 3 days ago, 1004 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482345
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#6I'm surprised at how non-obvious LLMs are for that decline chart. SO peaking in 2014 is not what I would have expected.
Me too. It does appear a bit more dramatic around when LLMs hit the scene but the was already a clear peak/decline starting well before.
Yeah, I think I gave up on SO myself right around then. Maybe a little earlier. The combination of decreasing usefulness and increasing unpleasantness made it easy to walk away.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#7I'm surprised at how non-obvious LLMs are for that decline chart. SO peaking in 2014 is not what I would have expected.
The chart is questions posted. Almost all my SO usage was looking at answers already posted. I only posted questions when I couldn’t find anything. I wonder if the pre-2023 decline is just because more and more of the questions people had were already covered.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#8I'm surprised at how non-obvious LLMs are for that decline chart. SO peaking in 2014 is not what I would have expected.
I'm not. A lot of moderators on SO thought that technology stayed the same from 2014 onward. So I'd often see questions that were exactly the same as the one I asked, but they'd be closed as a duplicate of a question that was subtly different in wording but totally different in technical content. And you would have had to be intimately aware of the systems the question was about to recognize the difference. Most of the moderators doing that did not know enough to be moderating. And so SO became a place where obsolete solutions got cemented in time and where once a question was answered somehow nobody ever tried to answer it again.
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#9Isn't this a sign that LLMs are self-cannibalizing? What data will LLMs be trained on when sites like StackOverflow die?
Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me too. It does appear a bit more dramatic around when LLMs hit the scene but the was already a clear peak/decline starting well before.
Yeah, I think I gave up on SO myself right around then. Maybe a little earlier. The combination of decreasing usefulness and increasing unpleasantness made it easy to walk away.
I know I always asked far fewer questions than I wanted to there for fear of being chastised. Maybe that's what the community wanted?