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
51–60 of 615 posts
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#52The collapse into a ghost town is striking. Not sure I would blame it all on AI though, the incentives of SO only worked while there were worthwhile questions to answer and make you feel smart about. After that well dried up, the only thing left was the stuff AI can do with a prompt; ironically AI got a leg up by scraping SO. This is similar to the evolution of Wikipedia, except the format of WP allowed it to transfo…
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#53Looks 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
#54So... nothing that it wasn't already doing to itself? There's no one drop where "AI got into the market", SO had been declining steadily for years. I actually expected this post to be about how SO survived by selling its internal organs to AI. Now do a graph for the money. https://www.wired.com/story/google-deal-stackoverflow-ai-gia...
Sure there is, number of questions halved from 100K in first of November 2022 to 50K exactly one year later.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#56Seing 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.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#57Looks 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.
for a lot of stuff it just made more sense to ask on the github project's issue tracker.
- Open question on SO: Moderators close because it's too specific to a library
- Ask on IRC: Get piled on for not using the right vocabulary and your IP isn't masked
- Ask the LLM: Get hallucinated answer based on old API docs
- Ask technical lead: Get burned for asking basic question and put on PIP
- Ask my mom: She doesn't know enough computer to know the answer, but in explaining the problem to her, I finally figured out what I got wrong
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb Goodness of Fit 0.911, Kurtosis -0.849, Skewness: 0.073 It's very much a bell curve
Just because it's approximated by a bell curve doesn't make it a bell curve. There are quite obvious separate phenomena shaping the curve at different times.
I'm going to assume this is bait...
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#59Seing 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
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#60This is IMO wrong. StackOverflow died way before AI - and way before 2020 too. I think it had a peak time of only 3 or 4 years. It was created in 2008, and I would reason it took a few years, say, up to 2011; then it was semi-okish up to about 2015, roughly. Then it declined. It still has some value today, as sometimes you can find useful information on SO, but its peak days are long over and I don't see how it can m…
The normal day to day devs just don’t have the need to go to stackoverflow anymore.
One would have to explain both consequences or dismiss it as coincidental.
FWIW I rarely have the need to ask questions at the programming level to anyone anymore. It’s just not the type of thing I bring up or anyone else. We now talk about architecture and company direction.