Honestly, I think that's a good thing. A lot of questions were either duplicates of existing questions, or close derivatives of them. If I had to guess, probably 90% of SO questions already had a solution somewhere on SO. AI surfaces these solutions much quicker, so you don't have to ask. Novel questions or bugs that can't be answered or fixed by AI still get asked, and mods have less spam to deal with. I fail to see the issue here.
What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
121–130 of 615 posts
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#122SO 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"
I just noticed that by around 2015 it had got super toxic and snippy. Usually I’d find answers on SO. Relatively rarely I’d ask questions but, when I did, I’d always try and follow the netiquette rules of yore, and think in terms of, if I was a support engineer trying to help with this, what would I need to know? Because I have supported products, and we’ve all seen enough bug reports and questions come in that we ca…
The anonymity of people giving aggressive and confrontational "answers" to a question reminds me of:
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#123SO 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"
Are you saying that the decline of SO can be explained by that and not AI? I don't buy it.
How eager people are to find something better IS a factor in the decline of websites/businesses. Not just that there is something better that exists.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#124SO 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"
I just noticed that by around 2015 it had got super toxic and snippy. Usually I’d find answers on SO. Relatively rarely I’d ask questions but, when I did, I’d always try and follow the netiquette rules of yore, and think in terms of, if I was a support engineer trying to help with this, what would I need to know? Because I have supported products, and we’ve all seen enough bug reports and questions come in that we ca…
I stopped posting there around then. Multiple times in a row I asked a question, got it closed as a duplicate/pointed to another thread/met with "why are you even trying to do that" despite being clear about my problem. It was obvious the people answering/closing the question skimmed it and I already gave a ton of context. It just stopped being useful
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#125AI didn't start the decline, it just finished it.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#126Good riddance. The graph peaked in 2014 and started to gradually go down in 2017, with the release of LLMs only adding fuel to the fire. They did this all to themselves with their way of how people are treated there.
Funnily enough, there's now a "StackOverflow for Agents": https://agents.stackoverflow.com/recent
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#127ChatGPT 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…
The graph is not presenting a narrative, did you mean to reply to someone else who is presenting the "revisionist history"? In 2023, Stack Overflow had already started making unpopular pro-AI moderation decisions, and in 2024, they started mass banning everyone who deleted their questions and answers in protest. I don't think it's wholly incorrect to say "AI killed Stack Overflow" when the death blow came from crazy…
> The graph is not presenting a narrative, did you mean to reply to someone else who is presenting the "revisionist history"?
The title of this thread is "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph." That's a narrative. At least before the mods change it.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#128SO 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 b…
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Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#129Looking at that chart, AI seems to have not done much of anything at all to Stack Overflow. They were already in sharp decline before LLMs became widely available.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit turned toxic long ago, like ten years ago and they brought in Ellen Pao to fix things, and she somehow managed to make things worse.
Ellen Pao was the glass scapegoat CEO designed to take all the flak for what the other investors and board members wanted to do. BTW Reddit is now verifying your ID with Persona before you can open anything it thinks is NSFW.
> BTW Reddit is now verifying your ID with Persona before you can open anything it thinks is NSFW.
I think this may depend on your country, I've never seen this (Spain), not on the new website nor old.reddit.com or anywhere else, NSFW or not.