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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

#291

Post by benrutter »

flyingshelf wrote: post #214
morningsam wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> would've been a "newcomer track" It's there now. Too late I guess. https://stackoverflow.com/help/what-is-staging-ground

>Staging Ground is available to two different types of users on Stack Overflow: > > - Users who are asking their first questions > - Users who want to review and offer guidance on newcomers’ posts

It looks a little different, like a "learn to use stack overflow correctly" type spot. I think what newbies want (I would have loved when I started out) is a "why is my code broken" type spot.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#292

Post by yalogin »

The move the current companies are missing is to have a legislation declaring ai as a person. Just like how corporations are people, if ai is a person then they don’t have to show number of people fired, can argues content creation and engagement is through the roof and so many other possibilities. /s

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#293

Post by gs17 »

executivevice wrote: post #85
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…

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…

> aquire comment points to be able to answer

I thought it was the opposite, you need answer points in order to comment (which resulted in people using answers as comments because they had no other option).

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#294

Post by dfabulich »

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…

The graph proves the cause of their decline was AI, and not aggressive question moderation.

Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020? Aggressive question-closing was part of their design from the very beginning. Their high barriers to question-asking was the cause of their rise, as their primary user was never question writers: it was Google, and anonymous Google users. The whole thing was an SEO play from start to finish.

It's fun to imagine that their aggressive moderation was the "real" cause of their decline. It feels so gratifying, doesn't it? Finally those assholes got their comeuppance, because of their bad behavior!

But that's not why they failed. They failed because SEO businesses can't survive when AI answers the question directly, without referring you any traffic.

(The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated.)

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#295

Post by xeromal »

rdiddly wrote: post #265
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 suspect I'm similar to many users, in that I came to Stack Overflow near the peak, and used it as basically a specialized search engine, without ever asking or answering a question. (I assume this is possible only if you use a widespread stack.) When something better came along, I just moved on. I hadn't directly experienced a sense of community, so I experienced (for example) bureaucratically-closed questions more…

As someone who came into the industry in college, the problem with SO was simply that it was too hard to ask a question. They were up your ass about minutia that really didn't matter. Good riddance and can't wait to visit the site and see an EOL static page.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#296

Post by lynndotpy »

wisemanwillhear wrote: post #242
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…

Maybe I'm wrong, but with the advances in AI, SO was in for a major reduction in usage not matter how good they were about enabling the community and encouraging collaboration. I realize that your mileage my vary with modern AI, but the AI has an immediacy and interactivity that together are impossible for SO to overcome. At this point their best option might be to find a way to pivot to an AI based interface while s…

I think so too, but many people have many oppositions to AI and would prefer knowledge to be in the hands of knowledgeable community, rather than AI companies. SO was poised to be this alternative, but leadership showed they did not see value in knowledge-work for its own sake.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#297

Post by chuckadams »

One thing that might have helped SO is if they actually embedded the supposed duplicate, and its answer, in the question, then had a checkbox for "was this the same as your question?" SO was never in the habit of listening to suggestions unless it was to nitpick them to death on meta, and there were plenty of other self-inflicted wounds with no technical quick fix.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#298

Post by xeromal »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #254
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…

> 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. I'm no Jon Skeet, but I've had an account since 2009, I answered a question early on that's had well over 1000 upvotes, which I think is 10k of reputation for that answer alone. Yet I certainly couldn't ask…

Now that's a name I haven't heard about in a long time. haha

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#300

Post by embedding-shape »

antonvs wrote: post #262
embedding-shape wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fictional, I never actually got burned by a tech lead nor been put on PIP either, nor asked my mom to help me with programming :)

That's not really relevant, the point is LLMs are actually pretty good for the scenario you described.

So is IRC, the relevance being that none of what I wrote in my initial comment is actually serious or my actual beliefs.
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