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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

#181

Post by smallmancontrov »

brap wrote: post #161
lynndotpy wrote: post #24

Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality. I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in t…

I can totally see myself asking questions on SO even these days, but there’s a good chance they’ll lock my post so why bother. Something about the SO incentive system created the most hostile platform imaginable.

Bullies -- people just looking to tear apart questions -- always have lower cost to answer and higher reward for answering than people looking to be helpful.

That said, the SO moderation was so awful I don't think it's correct to blame the downfall on the bully dynamic even if it was clearly present and might have eventually overrun the platform. I used to joke that an answer wasn't uniquely useful unless it had been locked as duplicate, but it wasn't really a joke: I kept a tally on a sticky note and of the posts I found useful, incorrect duplicate flags outnumbered open questions.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#182

Post by palata »

lilbigdoot wrote: post #124
bartread wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Happened to me as well. People would close it as duplicate when it clearly was different, they just did not understand the question themselves.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#183

Post by eknkc »

znpy wrote: post #134
lynndotpy wrote: post #24

Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality. I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in t…

> but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in this manner. i got stung by exactly this. i saw some of my early questions rewritten because some idiot mod that had not touched grass in a while thought that some words were better suited for stackoverflow. and don't get me wrong: i'm not talking about profanity, n-word or racial slurs, deroga…

I once had a fairly popular answer to a general question that included the word “mankind.” Someone changed it to “humankind,” another person changed that to “humans,” and eventually someone removed it altogether for no apparent reason. Then even more pointless edits followed. It became far too much hassle for absolutely no benefit.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#184

Post by nottorp »

lynndotpy wrote: post #24

Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality. I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in t…

> making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants

I used to look for questions to answer on my morning coffee. Then two things happened:

1. Rep chasers that rushed to answer anything with a copy/pasta from manuals (or at best semi related tutorials) showed up so there was no point or time in typing a complex answer.

2. Those long time users started downmodding "teach the man how to fish" answers and favoring "here's stuff ready to copy/paste" answers.

This was long before LLMs.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#185

Post by palata »

includenotfound wrote: post #155
TomMasz wrote: post #89

I never had an LLM tell me my question was already answered and imply I was stupid for not finding it. SO dug its own grave and jumped in.

Sometimes your question was simply visually similar to another but conceptually very different, and it'd get closed for being a duplicate anyway. Then you have to re-ask it, now with a couple extra disclaimers spelling out that indeed you did use the search function but no, the other visually similar question isn't actually the same as yours. Then you'd get maybe 2 comments and -2 in downvotes.

Sometimes? It happened more and more and when every second question was like this, I left. I wasn't going to fight against moderators forever.

That was before AI.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#186

Post by kittoes »

JustRouzbeh wrote: post #177

It’s pretty sad though. Like many developers, I used Stack Overflow a lot when I was starting out, and it helped me solve countless early programming problems A lot of what we have today was built with help from that community

The community did themselves no favors. I personally don't have any issues whatsoever dealing with it, but the overwhelming majority of my coworkers over the past decade haven't ever asked a single question. They saw how others were treated or heard about horror stories from some of the few souls who made the attempt and went "Why bother?"

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#187

Post by suzzer99 »

morningsam wrote: post #87
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"

That basic idea is what made SO attractive in the first place, compared to forums where you had to scroll through pages and pages of in-jokes and tangents and animated-GIF signatures just to try and see if there is an answer. Where they went wrong, in my opinion, is in the implementation details. It's mostly death by a thousand cuts: Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers…

> Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers deleted as "this should've been a comment"

Yep, this exactly happened to me. I felt like a taker for always reading SO but not contributing. I saw an answer that was out of date, so I tried to point it out. I couldn't make a comment, so I put it in another answer.

Got banned from answering until I got my points up, and the only way to do that was to ask questions, of which I had none. Never mind that the information I tried to post could have saved someone from going down the wrong path. Totally irrelevant. Rules must be followed.

And then I discovered SO meta. Holy cow. Those people were so far up their own butts, they couldn't see daylight. I was morbidly transfixed.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#189

Post by Dragas »

brap wrote: post #161
lynndotpy wrote: post #24

Any social organization needs to carefully consider their inclusion-exclusion curve with intentionality. I think a lot of people might balk at the word "inclusivity" today, but StackExchange had ridiculously high barriers to participation, making it inclusive to the long-time users on the site, but exclusive to the newbie participants who found themselves blocked for asking questions. They slowly killed the site in t…

I can totally see myself asking questions on SO even these days, but there’s a good chance they’ll lock my post so why bother. Something about the SO incentive system created the most hostile platform imaginable.

During the last decade that I've been asking/answering questions I only ever had 1 question locked as offtopic, and it was when they introduced question types. The several questions which I did report as invalid/offtopic/etc. were just error messages thrown by compiler without any substance of what you are supposed to look at to even determine how to help the author.

I'm genuinely confused whether people just parroted the memes or actually had their questions closed.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#190

Post by _aavaa_ »

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…

I don’t think we need to blame that sale. The same steady decline had been going since 2016. Itms clearly there in the graph, but everyone trumpeting the ChatGPT angle conveniently ignores the preceding 5+ years of continual decline.
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