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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

#411

Post by mlinhares »

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 had a pretty high rank on ruby and java answers, with some high traffic stuff, there were always people trying to completely edit my answers into something else entirely, it was such a shitty experience that I just decided the effort wasn’t worth it.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#412

Post by ButlerianJihad »

bsder wrote: post #410
dfabulich wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Ask yourself: in what year did it become difficult to ask questions on Stack Overflow? 2014? 2016? 2018? 2020? The year that Google made "open source contribution" a checkbox on your annual review. That's when almost ALL these types of sites went to dogshit. And then everybody followed Google which then weaponized it even more. Once Google made Fake Internet Points(tm) worth actual money via your annual review , al…

You’re actually on to something here, and it’s a phenomenon beyond Google that has engendered tons of blogspam and AIslop and manual LinkedIn slop.

Many professional certifications require bearers to earn CEUs. One way these may be earned is by blogging or doing demonstrations. So if you see a bunch of entry-level techbros doing really boring blog entries or posting to LinkedIn, you should know that they intend to earn CEUs for their particular professional certifications, such as CompTIA, et. al.

It’s not their fault... but Lord, how insufferable it can be!

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#413

Post by khurs »

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 didn't know that. Good to see they cashed out in time.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#414

Post by rcxdude »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #404
20k wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The gamification was a key reason the site became popular, but as the site grew, the rules and game mechanics did not evolve. An edit that made a response worse should have knocked the mod down so that they were unable to mod any more. The quality of the edit should have been determined by the original author. "Did this edit make your question better?" Moderators should have been ranked and scored based on their abil…

Being able to edit answers isn't even a mod thing. In fact, for most of SO's life, it wasn't even a 'being logged in' thing (you could just edit an answer anonymously). How they wound up with a Q and A site where you could edit another user's answer far more easily than leaving a comment on it I still will never fully understand.

(this kind of thing IMO really added to the utterly arcane set of rules and conventions that makes it feel so inaccessible)

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#415

Post by rcxdude »

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…

The barriers are far more understanding the very counterintuitive set of rules and expectations of the site than they were accumulating the points (though I don't think the decidedly odd set of things that require a certain reputation to do help at all).

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#416

Post by rcxdude »

mort96 wrote: post #111
f311a wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The graph shows questions, at some point they saturate, 90% of the stuff is answered. New frameworks contribute to the majority of the new questions.

Answers from 2013 likely no longer reflect the currently accepted ways to do things, even for technologies which existed in 2013 and earlier. What you describe is a problem they created on their own with their ridiculous duplicates policy which ignored the fact that the world keeps changing.

Well, a combination of that and understanding human psychology. For any of these common issues, SO usually had an answer of what you were supposed to do, but it was usually very counterintuitive.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#417

Post by smackeyacky »

inigyou wrote: post #361
Grombobulous wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On top of that, the AI will take a plain no-context error message and give it a college try to figure it out. A lot of times it will be right. 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.

If SO wants to be good, it will encourage a back-and-forth: "are you trying X?" but it doesn't want to be good. Private equity doesn't understand going concerns.

I think I’d like to see a site where people posted their chat results that ended in a successful resolution. Just for isolated bugs or library use questions. Would not be useful for a lot of the internal work I do but maybe saving those internally would be useful inside a company

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#418

Post by TacticalCoder »

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…

> That might be an incomplete date point, so using the next most recent value 1226, StackOverflow has lost 99.41% of its activity.

The biggest problem was highlighted from day one: StackOverflow was bound to become "DeadOverflow". It couldn't possibly work because the entire notion of having one correct answer to a question in a domain that constantly evolves was broken.

What killed the site was "Ever relevant question" showing up in a Google search (pick other search engine) and pointing to a "Correct and accepted answer" that was wrong with then another answer with more upvotes but which was... Already outdated.

That's why people coined the term "DeadOverflow": the very way the site was conceived would inevitably lead to dead answers.

And people pointed that out early on. Nobody listened, many of the OGs who created that company made a nice exit.

But SO was destined to eventually fail.

The entire karma/gamification/clique of users gate-keeping was bad but the issue of dead answers / DeadOverflow simply couldn't be solved, so it doesn't even matter.

Losing 99.41% of its activity is brutal but it's honestly surprising that a concept that couldn't possibly work even survived that long.

Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

#420

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

Stack Exchange has degenerated to the point of overt deletionism. It wasn't enough to just close the questions, they actually felt the need to delete the content people put effort into writing as well. There's nothing quite like trying to find a closed question that nonetheless had useful answers and comments with links, only to find that the entire thing had been deleted. They even do this in those beta sites which desperately need content.

They have only themselves to blame for their own demise, and I'm happy to see AI is eating their lunch.

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