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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

#351

Post by jl6 »

Sammi wrote: post #217
unreal37 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just went to the Stack Overflow homepage, showing newest questions first, and the latest question just asked 13 minutes ago is already closed. And the majority of the questions on page 1 have negative votes.

How good are the questions?

Here’s one:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79981854/how-to-run-mode...

-5 points, closed as not related to software development. It’s not a particularly great question, but clearly a bunch of people were more interested in keeping their garden tidy than in helping someone learn.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#352

Post by j45 »

Just like stackoverflow saved developers from experts exchange, it might be able to save us from what is coming from AI being an averaging engine by default and generating average code. Hopefully it's average but always works.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#353

Post by dmboyd »

xeromal wrote: post #319
cogman10 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the more annoying things about SO was they'd pretty frequently misclassify new questions. Sometimes a new question was in fact a duplicate and should be closed as such. But in the quest to close duplicates I pretty frequently had to argue with the reviewer that "No, this isn't a duplicate just because these two questions related to the same library". SO practically rewarded this sort of over-policing which I t…

Yeah, I had several questions popped for being an "opinion" question whatever that means. lol. Do you remember how power users would edit your question just for the gamification of it. Drove me nuts

That’s my only experience. Asking a direct technical question, only for it to be modified to a totally different question filled with essays of non-answers by folks who liked to answer their own questions I guess

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#354

Post by scrapcode »

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.

Even before SO most of the forums were the same way. You had grumpy ass holier-than-thou guys with 10,000 posts shutting down your questions before anyone else could answer.

The whole damn business model of a forum was to provide a solution to people that didn't want to / didn't know how to RTFM, but everyone was toxic as hell toward one for not wanting to do that.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#355

Post by sobellian »

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"

Quite some time ago, I would regularly navigate to SO's front page to check for new code golf questions. Then they moved those to a separate forum. I noticed this trend in other ways too - they slowly sucked all joy out of the site. They didn't want joy, they wanted to be a site for professionals, I guess. Now that AI has beat them in their last redoubt no one has any reason to visit.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#357

Post by luckydata »

SoftTalker wrote: post #338
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.

But the LLM will confidently give you a wrong answer and then waste three hours of your time going down tangential rabbit holes trying to sort it out. I never had an account, never asked or answered a question on SO, but found the answer I needed there plenty of times and got on with my work.

meh, in my experience good quality LLMs are significantly more correct than Stack Overflow ever was and have access to your code and machine to help you diagnose issues.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#358

Post by [deleted] »

sph wrote: post #311

I used to read Coding Horror, I have been a programmer for longer than I had high speed Internet, yet somehow I never felt the urge to create a StackOverflow account. I have literally never browsed the site, always landed from Google and left when I found my answer. There was an era of the Internet where moderators were seen as the solution to all the problems of Internet communities. Then we discovered that those pe…

[deleted]

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#359

Post by inigyou »

bananamogul wrote: post #267
Esophagus4 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like the most likely answer to me - though we all have our grievances with SO, the culture likely didn’t contribute to its decline as much as simply AI being a better tool.

Having experienced the SO culture, I like to think the culture caused it - schadenfreude - but it was probably inevitable given AI. Even if SO was the most wonderful friendly place in the galaxy, would you rather post a question and wait hours for a response, or get one instantly?

If the answers were better, you might.

They weren't. The most common answer was a hyperlink to an unrelated question followed by everyone being banned from answering your question

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