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Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

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Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#101

Post by tomrod »

I've found contributing questions or answers to SE/SO to be a lot of like hanging out in IRC channels dedicated to C -- a lot of blowhards tend to hang around the watering hole, berating people for lack of knowledge for some reason or another, expressing it in a variety of in-group approved ways.

It becomes tiresome to wade through the self-important moderation to get to actual content. That said, spam and unmoderated channels are clearly worse too. I'm not sure how to get to something in the middle of that Laffer curve.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#102

Post by hedora »

aCoreyJ wrote: post #76
DrBazza wrote: post #18

ML works well, when it is only trained on correct data. ML trained on all the things ever written about programming is going to get things wrong quite a lot of the time, and you'll only have the context of its reply to you, for you to figure out whether the ML answer is correct. And of course, ML always wants to please you with an answer. SO, on the other hand has accepted answers, and upvoted answers that are easier…

ML you can actually give context and a very specific question but SO you have to search and hopefully find a similar enough question that has an answer that isn't extremely outdated

You can give it context, and it will incorporate the context into the text of its response.

Good luck figuring out if it incorporated the context in the content of the answer though.

The internet already had too many low quality, misinformed pages. With Chat GPT, it now has an infinite number of pages like that. I’m not sure that makes a qualitative difference.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#103

Post by TheRealPomax »

indeed30 wrote: post #92
TheRealPomax wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the graph cuts off before 2023, so it tells us nothing about the actual effect it had, it cherry picked the initial drop off (or worse, they just used https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends , didn't even look at the time axis, and went "this proves our point"). It's Q3 of 2023, if you're going to argue a decline, why are you not looking at the most important three quarters of data?

No it doesn't - note the axis marks are every two years.

Ah, true.

That said, some of these are going back up. Java and C#, for instance, are clearly trending up again, as is Swift. Python's down, but by 10%ish, not 40%. And JS is down a lot but that's the one language you'd expect ChatGPT to actually be the best at "helping" with, given that it's the web's own programming language, so it being trained disproportionately more on JS than anything else would be hardly surprising.

And then there's languages for which ChatGPT might as well not exist: Lisp, Go, Rust, etc. Heck, if we were to look at Rust, for instance, ChatGPT did literally nothing. Its rise has been, and continues to be, meteoric. And if we look at arduino questions, you might even conclude that ChatGPT was a factor in driving people to Stackoverflow, not away from it.

Data science is hard, and certainly much harder than most folks (especially those with a programming background) think it is.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#104

Post by s_dev »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #62
s_dev wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't get this dependence problem. People want information to be 100% accurate? This is the internet -- lies and false claims are the standard. It's up to individuals to corroborate that the info they're looking at is reliable. Google provides a list of relevant results to a keyword search -- every one of those results can be bogus and no one bats an eye. ChatGPT provides text output based on a text input an…

Is entirely possible to hit some search result for a real human had a code hallucination. And to the topic, on stackoverflow that would have been deleted, downvoted or corrected. GPT will tell you it’s right… well, it’ll apologize, offer another solution that could also be wrong and now you are in a loop.

Only a computer can get stuck in a loop or a person who is insane. It's not like if you ask a person to divide by zero they will fall in to a coma or sit there computing.

I 100% believe that ChatGPT can output absolute garbage but for the same reason you don't cite Wikipedia/Google you won't be citing ChatGPT. Just like Wikipedia or Google It's just an excellent starting point to rapidly get a working draft going.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#105

Post by dustincoates »

kwstas wrote: post #29

I really don't buy it. There is considerably more interest in google trends for ChatGPT compared to StackOverflow. But I dont see one replacing the other. At least for me. I do not believe the google trend graphs,like "the scariest graph", in this post accurately reflect a decline of SO. There is a place for AI tools and StackOverflow is not the friendliest of places but the quality disparity between the answers you…

The Google Trends graph stuck out to me. You're comparing something that didn't exist before December and had broad appeal, to something that people arrive at generally by searching a question. They aren't at all comparable. (I imagine you'd see the same graph if you compared ChatGPT with Facebook. Doesn't mean ChatGPT is replacing social media.)

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#106

Post by the_jeremy »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #83

Not mentioned in the article is the negativity found with asking questions on Stack Overflow, where your question is marked as duplicate if it's vaguely like something else, if it's not worded exactly correctly, etc. A remarkable thing about asking ChatGPT questions is that you don't have to be defensive, you can just ask your question no matter how basic, dumb, or simple it is without justification. Seems a bad stat…

If you ask a bad question on SE (leave "bad" to be defined separately), you waste time of people who try to answer it, and of people who stumble across it hoping that it relates to them and solves their problem.

If you ask a bad question to ChatGPT, you waste no one's time but your own.

If answering SE was a job where you got paid, I would expect a lot more hand-holding (and some amount of kindness, to keep the revenue stream coming back), but instead, the people who answer questions do it more-or-less for fun. Having someone waste your time isn't fun.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#108

Post by [deleted] »

Maximus9000 wrote: post #79
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

People do stuff for money - they don't always enjoy it. This is a story as old as time. It reminds me of the Bob Dylan song "Hurricane": > Rubin could take a man out with just one punch > But he never did like to talk about it all that much > "It's my work" he'd say, "and I do it for pay > And when it's over I'd just as soon go on my way"

[deleted]

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#109

Post by dustincoates »

SamBorick wrote: post #30

Do y'all really use ChatGPT for coding questions? Every time I have tried, the answer I get is entirely wrong, and I end up going back to either first party documentation, or Stack Exchange.

The only coding adjacent thing I use it for is for building Excel/Google Sheets formulas, and it works really well for that.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#110

Post by bluetomcat »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #40

Looking at that graph though, what it tells me is that stackoverflow was entirely unaffected by ChatGPT, and the giant spike is just humanity collectively jumping on ChatGPT in addition to folks using Stackoverflow in exactly the same way as before? Same for that "answers over time" graph: that's literally what you'd expect for a knowledge base. There has to be an initial trend upwards as the site starts to accumulat…

It's a negative dynamic that starts from the popular, "low-hanging fruit" kinds of questions like "how do you subtract 2 dates in framework X". Such a question would gain many points both to the OP and the answerers. The best answer to a question like that is short, unambiguous and concise. Consequently, you have high-reputation users skilled in answering popular questions. Then the popular questions are mostly over and people start asking questions about a particular problem hidden in their piece of code, and high-rep users sneer at it because they see it as "not researched".
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