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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

#171

Post by jeanlucas »

I don't have the time to, but I'm surprised there aren't a lot of comments on the decline before chatGPT was released, but after SO was sold to Prosus [1][2]

Even the curious growth spike in activity happened just before the acquisition. I wish I had time to do this analysis a bit deeper, but you can look for SO activity up until when chatGPT was released, it is really noticeable.

---

[1] Stack Overflow acquired by Prosus for $1.8 billion: https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/02/stack-overflow-acquired-by...

[2] Prosus to acquire Stack Overflow for US$1.8 billion https://www.prosus.com/news-insights/2021/prosus-to-acquire-...

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#173

Post by skillina »

mort96 wrote: post #107
sevenseacat wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that's literally what the site was designed for. It was not designed to be a community. It was designed to be a Q&A site.

A Q&A site where the community asks questions and the community answers them. That doesn't work without a community.

Community won't stick around if the questions they're shown aren't stimulating, either.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#174

Post by alloyed »

jeanlucas wrote: post #77
embedding-shape wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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

yep! 90% of the time if i have a question about a project there's a discussions tab that can take my question with a nearly identical interface to stack overflow's, and I can be reasonably sure there will be contributors or maintainers who will see it. Not much point to stack overflow as a second, silo'd site in that world

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#175

Post by SkiFreeWin3 »

jeanlucas wrote: post #171

I don't have the time to, but I'm surprised there aren't a lot of comments on the decline before chatGPT was released, but after SO was sold to Prosus [1][2] Even the curious growth spike in activity happened just before the acquisition. I wish I had time to do this analysis a bit deeper, but you can look for SO activity up until when chatGPT was released, it is really noticeable. --- [1] Stack Overflow acquired by P…

This is the more valuable take. AI simply accelerated an existing condition.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#178

Post by jeanlucas »

inigyou wrote: post #28
Someone1234 wrote: post #20

ChatGPT 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.

For those who don't know what the Monica affair was: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/393046/who-or-what-...

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#179

Post by palata »

baq wrote: post #120
executivevice wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

S/o's somewhat cumbersome scheme to aquire comment points to be able to answer was a awkward kludge in the principal problem of open contribution sites, namely that human slop and gamified tactics tend to kill the site. It probably was effective enough to keep things working for a long time but it could not recruit new users (not just readers) as fast as it needed to. It doesn't seem like the points based system real…

It’s moderation policies, or maybe just moderators themselves that killed it, this was apparent before AI, but there was no alternative… until suddenly there was.

This. I left SO before AI because moderators were terrible.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#180

Post by palata »

amelius wrote: post #112
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"

Are you saying that the decline of SO can be explained by that and not AI? I don't buy it.

I personally left SO because I felt moderation had become toxic, and that was before AI. And I was relatively active, like in the top 5%.
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