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What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

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Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#41

Post by fluoridation »

iso1631 wrote: post #22
gyan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Definitely this. The moderators seemed to have the Lock Question button connected to their dopamine pathways.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#42

Post by embedding-shape »

khalic wrote: post #11

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

Yeah, I don't understand the HN title. The "downfall" seems to have began in 2018-2020 sometime, what AI was launched and popularized at that point that would have killed SO? LLMs were basically useless until GPT3 which appeared in middle-2020 sometime, after the downfall seemingly already had begun.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#45

Post by rib3ye »

bluedino wrote: post #15
nolok wrote: post #9

SO 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"

As noted by others, the initializer for the curt communication culture was "don't ask stupid questions, idiot."

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#46

Post by Havoc »

nolok wrote: post #9

SO 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"

>"no conversation please"

Good for training data I guess - pure Question and Answer. Maybe they knew the platform would die so decided to optimise for that

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#47

Post by dudul »

SO's downfall started way before AI. A decade or so ago it was always full of interesting questions, people were giving detailed answers, there was sometimes some debate in the answers, etc

And then it started being stupid questions. People who clearly had barely tried anything and just rushed to SO with a half baked question. Answers were just pointing to another thread that already provided the answer. It definitely started before LLMs. I think it lined up with the aggressive "learn-to-code" push.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#48

Post by khalic »

fluoridation wrote: post #33
khalic wrote: post #11

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

It's not really a bell curve. There was obviously a downwards trend from 2016 onwards, but 2023 definitely precipitated the fall to zero. Without AI they might have lasted at least a couple more years, or the activity might have stabilized to a new floor greater than zero.

https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb

Goodness of Fit 0.911, Kurtosis -0.849, Skewness: 0.073

It's very much a bell curve

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#50

Post by dudul »

simianwords wrote: post #14

The 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.

I noticed the same thing. Another thing that seems to have disappear: lunch and learn focusing on the tech stack. And I mean specifically about "how to do this in <programming language", not product/company focused.
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