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We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

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Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#11

Post by zabzonk »

Speaking as someone that was a SO front-page contributor, and at one brief time the top of the pops on the C++ tag, I didn't think it was so bad. And you got a free t-shirt!

What you have to understand is the avalanche of low-quality questions that came in, pushed by "academics" who should have known better, telling students things like "just ask on SO - they will write it for you", which is bad on so many levels.

But when it got really bad was when the new owners, after Jeff & co sold out, took over. Woke nonsense sprouted everywhere, people with no technical knowledge did moderation. And, whoa, if you criticised this, you were banned. That's when I gave up.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#13

Post by jrjeksjd8d »

Like so many things in American life these days, we've arrived at a "better solution" that extracts value from the past without producing a future. The decades of Stack Overflow answers fed into LLM training produce plausible answers for today. In 10 years what will the LLMs train on?

So much of life these days is purely extractive, trying to squeeze more money out of less productive activity. It's no wonder young people feel disillusioned and are increasingly focused on gambling and "investing" in meme stocks.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#14

Post by foobarian »

throwway120385 wrote: post #8
MattGaiser wrote: post #2

I'm surprised at how non-obvious LLMs are for that decline chart. SO peaking in 2014 is not what I would have expected.

I'm not. A lot of moderators on SO thought that technology stayed the same from 2014 onward. So I'd often see questions that were exactly the same as the one I asked, but they'd be closed as a duplicate of a question that was subtly different in wording but totally different in technical content. And you would have had to be intimately aware of the systems the question was about to recognize the difference. Most of t…

Seems like the LLM training problem but just manifesting in humans.

Actually wonder if replacing all the moderators with LLM would be an improvement.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#15

Post by ronbenton »

pinus-cembra wrote: post #9

Isn't this a sign that LLMs are self-cannibalizing? What data will LLMs be trained on when sites like StackOverflow die?

I have always wondered this. As more and more content on the internet becomes AI generated, does it become some kind of feedback loop where the hallucinations amplify themselves? Maybe someone smart can come along and help me understand the plan for this, if there is one.

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#16

Post by voidUpdate »

> "Recently, a graph of the total number of Stack Overflow questions over time started making rounds on the internet"

Isn't that a graph of questions per timeframe, not total questions? If it was total questions, that would imply a massive cull of existing questions, not a decline in usage

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#17

Post by pixelesque »

A couple of thoughts:

That graph is number of questions asked being posted: very often the question already exists (although obviously with technology and frameworks changing over time, things aren't constant, and answers can be out of date at some point), so you don't need to post the question.

Also: Would LLMs be as good for answers if they hadn't been trained on scraping StackOverflow in the first place?

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#18

Post by ronbenton »

CommonGuy wrote: post #12

StackOverflow always wanted less low-quality questions, which is now the case. Whether they still receive some high-quality ones... But I'm sure the website still receives a lot of views, as it still is highly ranked in Google.

Do we know that it's fewer low-quality questions? Or is that just assumed because it's fewer total questions?

Re: We might have been slower to abandon StackOverflow if it wasn't a toxic hellhole

#19

Post by Groxx »

Yeah, I'm fond of this graph personally: https://mastodon.social/@grahamperrin@bsd.cafe/1158357533238...

StackOverflow has been in a clear, strong decline for quite a while. LLMs just hammered in the final nail. It's very clear that they caused a substantial drop, but not as impactful as the years of stagnation and rise of competition.

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