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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

#71

Post by mort96 »

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"

Yeah, SO's downfall started looong ago. The community was frankly horribly managed, and its strict "no remotely duplicate-esque questions ever" policy meant that answers to common questions just got more and more outdated as time went on. It's still common to search for something, find an SO thread, and find that the only answers are from 2013. The world has changed since 2013, answers in 2026 would be different, but because the question would be the same, any contemporary attempt at asking the same question would get marked as a duplicate, so the 2013 answer remains SO's only guidance forever.

They also had the problem that easy questions would get downvoted for being too easy, and hard questions would just not get answered because they weren't seen in time by the narrow group of people who could answer so they get buried by the algorithm. Working in something of a less common niche myself (embedded Linux), I never had questions get answered. I believe the question ranking systems and moderation policies really only worked for questions about new, popular web frameworks.

It was ChatGPT which did it in, but it could've been anything. It could've been a new group of people with some clout starting a fresh new knowledge site. People were ready to abandon SO.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#72

Post by hilariously »

Ekaros wrote: post #61
hilariously wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, SO was dying before the GPTs - in some ways it was baked in the original SO design - to become the canonical source of information about programming stuff. Many people talk about the negativity, and they are right, but I think the reason more than anything is the waiting. On SO a good question might get answered in minutes (if it was easy and someone was karma farming) but it could be days or weeks for general p…

Somehow I feel that whole idea was 50% broken from start. In field changing as fast as programming you simply cannot have canonical source that is done. There are areas which are constant or slow moving. But too many others are in churn. Trying to apply same rules for both is clearly insanity. And this is really the failure of SO... Maybe if in some cases stuff actually got deprecated and points did actively decay it…

You also have to think that SO was very early in gamification and changing things around that never got political will afaict - people love their points.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#73

Post by faangguyindia »

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"

Reddit is on the same track. What I've noticed is that moderators have become increasingly hostile. Reddit's AI moderation, which is designed to remove AI slop, has removed multiple top contributors I used to follow on programming, electronics, bodybuilding, welding, machining, and 3Dprinting subs. And the worst part is that Reddit site admins have no idea about this. I know a guy who reckons he can get any account banned from Reddit by simply mass reporting it using residential IP providers and OpenClaw.

Good luck trying to write any helpful posts in the community anymore, someone will come along and respond with "AI."

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#74

Post by lima »

Havoc wrote: post #46
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

It always worked like that

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#75

Post by [deleted] »

embedding-shape wrote: post #57
pydry wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for a lot of stuff it just made more sense to ask on the github project's issue tracker.

- Open issue on GitHub issues: Maintainer closes issue citing "Bug reports only" - 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…

[deleted]

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#76

Post by khalic »

j_maffe wrote: post #68
khalic wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

check my other response, it's very much a bell curve, statistically speaking https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb

> statistically speaking That's a very big word you're using there for what is basically making shapes out of clouds. A bell-curve is the amortised function of a random variable with a mean and standar deviation. What does that have to do with a timeseries dataset?

A bell curve is not an "amortised function." Amortization applies to accounting and algorithmic time complexity, not probability distributions. You're likely thinking of a Probability Density Function (PDF). If you are going to police terminology, it helps to use the correct words. Second, fitting a curve with an R^2 of 0.911 is the exact opposite of "making shapes out of clouds.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#77

Post by jeanlucas »

embedding-shape wrote: post #57
pydry wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for a lot of stuff it just made more sense to ask on the github project's issue tracker.

- Open issue on GitHub issues: Maintainer closes issue citing "Bug reports only" - 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…

Usually #1 actually works, most cases, and missing discord, several healthy communities on Discord nowadays

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#78

Post by khalic »

j_maffe wrote: post #70
khalic wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are confusing a Probability Density Function (PDF) with a phenomenological curve fit. No one is claiming that time is a random variable drawn from a normal distribution.

> No one is claiming that time is a random variable drawn from a normal distribution. You are doing that implicitly by fitting a Gaussian curve.

Fitting a mathematical function to a dataset does not implicitly adopt the ontological baggage of probability theory. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of applied mathematics

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#79

Post by blablabla123 »

The graph actually peaked in 2014. That's a decade before AI became a thing while the Software engineering workforce grew a lot since then.

I think Stackoverflow was the last incarnation of romanticized old-school Q&A forums where you first had to earn your badges before being treated with respect. Luckily today's new projects have much better documentation, issue tracker's etc. And apparently AI is able to work with that by now...

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#80

Post by [deleted] »

embedding-shape wrote: post #57
pydry wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for a lot of stuff it just made more sense to ask on the github project's issue tracker.

- Open issue on GitHub issues: Maintainer closes issue citing "Bug reports only" - 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…

[deleted]
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