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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

#321

Post by maerF0x0 »

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…

If it wasn't so controlled it'd might as well have just been reddit.

I agree there's a balance, and maybe they edged over the line, but I was consistently happy to have the following be the outcomes

1. Answers were reasonably close to correct, usable, informative (teaching)

2. Your site score came to mean something -- I once had a hiring CTO say "Oh you have some popular answers on the techs we use"

3. Progressive unlocks helped guide the path of participation -- it was clear what to start with, and what to do next as you were taught their culture and ways. It's not very popular to say in 2026, but not every culture is good and it's important to curate culture and teach newcomers the culture of the space.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#322

Post by firesteelrain »

dfabulich wrote: post #294
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 a…

You aren’t downvoted on Wikipedia. And people have been complaining about heavy handed editors and mods there for a long time. Same with SO.

It’s pretty much a meme now.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#323

Post by pygy_ »

dfabulich wrote: post #294
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 a…

> The same thing is happening to Wikipedia, BTW, which is also aggressively moderated

[citation needed]

Well here it is, and you're wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics

The article creation and edits curves are stable. The former growing at a slightly declining pace, which is expected since the amount of knowledge is finite. The latter is literally flat.

The monthly page views are in decline on mobile (from ~5.7 billions at the peak in 2024 to 4.5 billions currently). They are stable YoY on desktop at ~3.7 billions, and have been rising in the recent months.

StackOverflow is dead, the WP community is thriving, even if the page views have declined a bit.

SO had a moat because of its mass, but the place was a cesspool.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#324

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

b112 wrote: post #148
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…

You know, there's a lot of really good data on Stack Overflow, regardless of all the issues. I hope somebody saves it all.

Up until a few years ago, SO published full dumps onto the Internet Archive. There has been a community effort which has picked up the torch and is continuing to do the same on a ~monthly cadence.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#325

Post by Izkata »

dfabulich wrote: post #294
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 a…

Yeah, this is much more accurate to what was actually happening. During that high period they struggled to get people to stop posting low-quality "do my homework" style questions - despite what people on here say the barrier for entry was extremely low and those made up the vast majority of what was posted.

I've maintained that if they handled this AI-caused decline well, they could return the site to its better days before the flood of people who didn't know what they were doing, offloading the bad questions while getting still getting all the good ones. I'm not sure they're even trying.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#327

Post by eterm »

dfabulich wrote: post #294
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 a…

You're right, the main decline was AI, but it was on a downward trajectory anyway.

This graph shows a distinct change pre-dating AI, starting 2014, there's explosive growth which suddenly stops around then.

A soft decline which carries on until Covid caused a temporary reversal of that.

The soft decline then continues at a pace around where it was, until November 2022, when it suddenly accelerates to its death. That's ChatGPT of course.

But the site was already in decline, against the backdrop of vastly increased software developers and software development, because of hostility.

Software developers used Stackoverflow despite the hostility, because there was no alternative.

The early growth wasn't caused by the moderation, because the early moderation was a lot softer.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#328

Post by TrainedMonkey »

DrewADesign wrote: post #215
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…

Their rules, (I believe unintentionally) give iron-fisted fiefdom rulers a toolbox of justifications to control and alienate under the guise of protecting the quality of the site data. I honestly don’t even think most of the control freak mods could objectively judge the propriety of their actions because it was all encouraged by the rules. (And I do not think this was universal among the mods, but it was certainly e…

I think it's all about incentives. The power to governance was given to prolific and tenured accounts who wanted to govern. Over the long timeframe their incentive averages to making their life easier and keeping the governance. Wikipedia is going through something similar.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#329

Post by casey2 »

There's always going to be lots of latent insecurity among amateurs when a pro shows up.

Honestly because of this and the relative lack of actual pros on the site, real pros will get pushed out and the site will actually build a collection of misinformation. That's probably why pros feel that software quality has dropped so much in since stackoverflow.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#330

Post by fluoridation »

strken wrote: post #165
fluoridation wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because it's approximated by a bell curve doesn't make it a bell curve. There are quite obvious separate phenomena shaping the curve at different times.

Do you mean "just because it's a bell curve, doesn't make it a normal distribution"?

No, I meant what I said.
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