Seing a bell curve and singling out a factor that appears only for the 15% of the total time demonstrates some pretty extreme tunnel vision
What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
11–20 of 615 posts
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#12Stackoverflow did it to themselves by having incredibly unhelpful users
If that was the case, the graph would never have gotten to the heights it did.
What happened is that as the corpus of useful info increased, the need to pose new Qs decreased. AI much accelerated that decline by making available an 'oracle' trained on that corpus.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#13Except for covid, it seems the decline was already there.
The decline you're talking about is roughly 168 to 145, or about 2.2% per year over 5 years.
That's hardly a death sentence. More likely just the gradual adoption of higher level frameworks and languages with less ugly parts.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#14The company my friend works for has a slack channel for help with code, like an internal stackoverflow. It’s almost inactive now.
I asked to see one of the questions from 2024 - it could have been solved with one LLM search.
We have eliminated a whole genre of peer to peer communication.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#15SO did that all to themselves when they decided they didn't want a community to form and that only question and answers mattered. The moment something else allowed to have a better way to get your answers, there was no reason to go there, because there was no community. I still don't understand why anyone would go with that whole "no conversation please"
There used to also be fun, and somewhat interesting questions to answer or discuss.
It quickly turned into simple questions and "send me the codes"
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#16Stackoverflow did it to themselves by having incredibly unhelpful users
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Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#17Stackoverflow did it to themselves by having incredibly unhelpful users
That increased at the same rate of lazy/stupid users.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#18Finally, something good done by AI against these modern-day dictators and pharaohs.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#19The stackoverflow moderation is the reason I do not post on it.
You have middle party with no competence on the technology trying to do useless moderation.
Instead I directly go on the project github page and ask the question directly to the mainteners.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#20ChatGPT was released in Nov 2022, and frankly wasn't very good originally. The SO decline started occurring almost two years ahead of that, and was already on a sharp decline before ChatGPT shipped, and certainly before ChatGPT actually became good.
This is revisionist history. People told SO that they were leaving for YEARS because of how incredibly toxic it had become. It was already giving outdated answers before ChatGPT shipped, because new questions/potentially updated answers were [Closed] [Dupe] immediately.
Their answer was essentially "We aren't a Q&A site, we're trying to be a knowledge base! So closing all questions on a Q&A-stylized site, and extremely abrasive moderation, is working as intended."
They entirely did this to themselves. The community was toxic, their policies were toxic, and they didn't listen when warned as such repeatedly - just doubled down.