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 Edit: https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb
This isn't really a bell curve.
What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
21–30 of 615 posts
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#22Stackoverflow 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.
There was also the pattern of "closing as already answered" with an answer from 6 years earlier which wasn't actually answering the question when you dig into it. Certainly in the code stacks.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#23Stackoverflow 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.
It just accelerated the trend, and I am sure that reddit took over for a lot of new users.
The different problems with SO has been well documented.
And they killed maybe one of the most side features of it : https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/415293/sunsetting-j...
So yeah metakill your own brands with stupid policies.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#24Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality.
I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner.
The community might have survived this folly, even with AI, because it was still the best place for people with qualms about AI to ask questions... Except until StackOverflow management alienated those users, too, by shoving AI down their throats in every facet of the site.
Even I had internalized the vagaries and neuroses of the SO community but I had heavy reticence to ask questions, knowing I'd have to consider all the ways a bully eager to use their powers might misunderstand me. I can't imagine asking a question there without having had lurked for longer than a typical Bachelor's + Masters program.
Peak at 207K, minimum at 588. That might be an incomplete date point, so using the next most recent value 1226, StackOverflow has lost 99.41% of its activity.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#25If there is not allowed to be duplicate questions isn't it by design that as the site and industry matures the number of posts go down.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#26Stackoverflow 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.
It's both. Users tolerated the hostile environment to an extent as long as the site was still the best way to get useful information. When LLMs came out, that was no longer the case.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#27Seing a bell curve and singling out a factor that appears only for the 15% of the total time demonstrates some pretty extreme tunnel vision Edit: https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb
this. Thanks for pointing it out, I fell for "oh it was just AI" at first.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#28ChatGPT 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…
Two years before ChatGPT is shortly after Joel and Jeff sold Stack Overflow to private equity.
The Monica affair was one of the first symptoms.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#29Looks like SO was already dying since 2017.
I think other helpful places like reddit, discord, web forums etc might be what hit SO 2014-15 onwards.
AI seems to have given it a blow of mercy to end the misery.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#30Finally, something good done by AI against these modern-day dictators and pharaohs.
Careful - the LLM companies are also modern day dictators and pharoahs.