341–350 of 615 posts
Seing a bell curve and singling out a factor that appears only for the 15% of the total time demonstrates some pretty extreme tunnel vision Edit: https://postimg.cc/n9nZGLmb
At the same time, this is graph is something that really should not look anything like a bell curve. So the format is probably just a coincidence.
Except if the "all the questions have been asked" hypothesis is correct. What I really doubt.
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How good are the questions?
This is why people use AI so heavily. Because no matter how bad or ill formed a question is, it wo answer it the most "caring" way possible, and never berate you for it being a stupid question, common sense, etc (as long as it is about some forbidden topic of course)
On SO that experience is going to be “we closed this because you didn’t form a good question.”
And of course, that’s true, but it demonstrates the wide gulf in user experience between the two platforms.
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How else do you help people learn if not by giving feedback? As an avid helper in a programming related discord channel I need you to understand that a lot of the people who come to these places for help are incredibly stupid. It's not uncommon to have to converse with a person for 15+ minutes just to get them to give you enough information to understand what their problem is. Like they will just paste an error messa…
You just described the complete opposite of the StackOverflow experience.
Here’s an example: my account on StackOveflow has enough reputation to answer questions on SO, but on other StackExchange sites that are very related I can’t do that just because I spent more time on StackOverflow.
The whole setup is basically repelling you from engaging by design. The site should already know from my SO reputation that I’m trustworthy enough to answer stuff on the other similar tech related stackexchange sites.
It was built for a time when you actually needed to filter out low quality questions and answers, but now that the users have abandoned the ecosystem the bouncer at the door makes a whole lot less sense.
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I remember having to fight a mod for him to restore a reply penned by Mike Pall, to a LuaJIT question. Mike Pall is the author of LuaJIT. The reply had been either deleted or edited to the point of being wrong (memory is foggy), because Mike Pall wasn't an expert at SO, and had somehow not used the site exactly as intended. The mod was very dismissive and patronizing.
I was going through some answers on a stackoverflow thread, and noticed that every single one had been edited by the same guy, just.. adding his own personal opinions and 'corrections' to them, and in the process making them universally worse and less correct The idea that answers should be editable, and the gamification of stackoverflow, was an absolutely terrible combination
At some point the (say 2013-2014 or so) the site deteriorated quite massively, though - as folks considered stackoverflow CV worthy material...
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In the age of gratuitously encouraging LLMs and constant slop I sometimes miss the way in which stack exchange punished people for putting in low effort. I recently asked a LLM a question simply out of newfound habit. I realized while reading the line that this command seemed very familiar. I had bookmarked the exact same command in stack exchange many years ago. Of course the fact that stack exchange traffic has dra…
> Taking personal offense to someone insulting your question is something you should learn to get over. I did get over it when I stopped bothering with SO. Sorry, but a community whose ethos is "you need a thick skin to belong" is not one most people even want to belong to.
Just beware an operating principle based on what "most people" want. Nearly all human societies that I am aware of bake in a caution to this impulse into their grounding philosophies. Because humans have always ultimately recognized that while seductive at first, taking guidance merely from "what most people want" is a path to decay.
Garbage in, garbage out. The inalienable right vs the mob. Three men make a tiger (三人成虎). Does the market always know best? Low quality, low effort questions are ultimately destructive to the ends of something like stackexchange. No need to apologize, they evidently didn't want you there either. Again, it's not personal. They may be gone tomorrow. Zoom out just a little bit farther and you will, in all likelihood, not be far behind.
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.
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 un…
And why do you think most people (and LLMs) just Google " reddit" ??
The graph actually peaked in 2014. That's a decade before AI became a thing while the Software engineering workforce grew a lot since then. I think Stackoverflow was the last incarnation of romanticized old-school Q&A forums where you first had to earn your badges before being treated with respect. Luckily today's new projects have much better documentation, issue tracker's etc. And apparently AI is able to work with…
That's obviously because initially there were a lot of basic newbie questions to be asked, and those continued to be relevant in search results, so the amount of new questions went down over time, as there were fewer relevant unanswered questions left.