The graph starts falling shortly after 2020. AI certainly contributed but Stack Overflow was dying without it.
What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
101–110 of 615 posts
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#102Did they cry about it? No right? Don't apply your own standard then judge them about it, petty people.
Stackoverflow aimed to be a knowledge base. And knowledge base has a ceiling limit. They simply reached the point that almost all questions (regarding the knowledge) were asked for them. You can argue that newer or niche libraries or languages knowledge is still lacking there, but I have never seen them getting closed, just not answered.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#103Looks like SO was already dying since 2017. I think other helpful places like reddit, discord, web forums etc might be what hit SO 2014-15 onwards. AI seems to have given it a blow of mercy to end the misery.
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.
> at some point they saturate, 90% of the stuff is answered
I don’t buy this.
Programming as an industry is famous for constantly evolving and changing.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit turned toxic long ago, like ten years ago and they brought in Ellen Pao to fix things, and she somehow managed to make things worse.
Ellen Pao was the glass scapegoat CEO designed to take all the flak for what the other investors and board members wanted to do. BTW Reddit is now verifying your ID with Persona before you can open anything it thinks is NSFW.
Only the new Reddit, old.reddit.com still works for that too.
Though I'm not sure how long that'll last. I would be surprised if old.reddit.com is still functional in a couple of years. When it gets removed, or when it bit rots to the point that it's no longer really feasible to use it, I'm off that site. New Reddit doesn't work for me.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> just because it's approximated by a bell curve doesn't make it a bell curve I'm going to assume this is bait...
Bell curves are probability distributions. This is a time series, so it can’t be a bell curve. It just has the same shape.
Are you discarding the utility of Gaussian functions in analysis simply because the independent variable is time? A Gaussian curve can be used as a descriptive model without claiming that the observations themselves are a probability distribution
The fit does not prove causation, but it does show that the decline was already well described by a trend that began years before generative AI. If the claim is that 2023 created a separate structural break, it's different claim then the title describes
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reddit turned toxic long ago, like ten years ago and they brought in Ellen Pao to fix things, and she somehow managed to make things worse.
Ellen Pao was the glass scapegoat CEO designed to take all the flak for what the other investors and board members wanted to do. BTW Reddit is now verifying your ID with Persona before you can open anything it thinks is NSFW.
Not when I open it from a web browser without being logged in. It just ask if I'm 18 and if I click yes, it lets me see the post (including images).
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#107SO 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"
I mean, that's literally what the site was designed for. It was not designed to be a community. It was designed to be a Q&A site.
A Q&A site where the community asks questions and the community answers them. That doesn't work without a community.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#108SO 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"
That basic idea is what made SO attractive in the first place, compared to forums where you had to scroll through pages and pages of in-jokes and tangents and animated-GIF signatures just to try and see if there is an answer. Where they went wrong, in my opinion, is in the implementation details. It's mostly death by a thousand cuts: Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers…
Off topic, closed.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I don't understand the HN title. The "downfall" seems to have began in 2018-2020 sometime, what AI was launched and popularized at that point that would have killed SO? LLMs were basically useless until GPT3 which appeared in middle-2020 sometime, after the downfall seemingly already had begun.
I'd call it significant that the number of questions halved within one year following the release of ChatGPT, the biggest relative or absolute rate of decrease in the timeseries.
Right around the time Google rolled out new search results removed many information based sites.
Re: What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph
#110SO 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"
That basic idea is what made SO attractive in the first place, compared to forums where you had to scroll through pages and pages of in-jokes and tangents and animated-GIF signatures just to try and see if there is an answer. Where they went wrong, in my opinion, is in the implementation details. It's mostly death by a thousand cuts: Requiring reputation to gain the ability to post comments, then having one's answers…
My favorite thing was how for half the stuff I Googled, the top result would be a StackOverflow reply telling me to Google it.