Live data from Hacker News

Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

thediff.co

111–120 of 179 posts

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#111

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.

What do you mean "entirely wrong"?

... that it doesn't work exactly "as printed" when copy-pasted into an IDE? Or that it fundamentally misses the intent of the question? Or that it got some important key details right and messed-up other things?

Usually, in my experience, it's the last one. Often all you need is a clue to get you thinking in the right direction. Interactively asking chat-gpt questions and critically evaluating it's answers has been far more helpful than I could have ever imagined.

Does it ALWAYS help? No.

Is it an exciting and emergent alternative to what we've had before? Hell yes.

The first party docs are, of course, the gold standard. But they're often far more detailed and canonical than folks are ready to absorb.

SO can be helpful IF you can find your question already there and the answers are still relevant, or if you manage to ask your question in exactly the right way and the duplicate-police haven't shut it down (regardless of whether it's actually dupe). Or if a kind soul has provided a clue for you in a comment as your question was downvoted into oblivion.

Another option, IMHO, is github issues/discussion. The library developers are often there and generous about helping people out (without the perverse and infantile incentives of gamification that afflicts SO). But this option should really only be reserved for very carefully asked questions. In a way it has a higher bar than SO (but without the negative reinforcement of downvotes).

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#112

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.

I'm a 56 year-old product marketer who used ChatGPT (plus Midjourney) to build an entire SaaS application and landing page: creatormail.io I've had some seasoned developers review my (ChatGPT's) Python and got positive feedback with some constructive suggestions.

The avatar people on the front page have 3, 4 and 6 fingers

so it checks out, it’s AI generated

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#113
If we believed ChatGPT was the cause of an SO decline, then I'd expect it to also cause a decline in Google searches for programming queries. Here's the Google Trends data for two super-common error codes and one more conceptual programming search query:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

Maybe a little something going on with typeerror? Or just noise. But it definitely doesn't look to me like evidence supporting the article's claim.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#114

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…

This is a good point. With the infinite number of uses outside of programming, you wouldn’t expect to see SO interest correlate with GPT. And if it’s not negative that’s a win. SO has accessibility problems for beginners and a meta game for more advanced users. But there is no evidence of a death spiral here. If anything… GPT could help SO by relieving the massive number of basic questions that GPT actually can answe…

The simple questions are certainly the ones that ChatGPT is least likely to reconstruct wrong, so especially for super popular languages with huge bodies of work on the internet, you'd expect ChatGPT to act as a decent pre-filter, finally ensuring folks don't end up asking "how do I sort this list based on properties inside my objects" for the millionth time =)

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#115
post #24
post #16

From my experience, interacting with stack overflow and other software related sister communities has always left a bitter taste in my mouth. Ignoring the elephant in the room that I do use SO everyday with some success, but it’s mostly replaced by ChatGPT. The ridiculous (IMHO) moderation under the guise of “we have only one purpose” often didn’t even align with that goal. The writing was on the wall. So many questi…

ChatGPT at least seems like it is trying to help me. The meta games going on in SO are a whole lot more of a mess and ChatGPT is more than happy to hear my question a 3rd time and spit out the same answer as before but change a few things. SO, not so much.

I've found it refreshing to be able to ask a performance-related question and not get a trite reply about premature optimization. It's frustrating reading a well-researched, obviously informed question about a specific thing and the top reply is "Why do you need this? Did you profile it?". Nothing new is learned and the cynical part of me thinks it's just a race to get free Stack Overflow points.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#116
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…

There is also regression to the mean. Human experts can sort out through advice and by reflecting on it, pick only the best. ChatGPT will give you, at best, average opinion. It won't help you get to the top, because the top is an outlier.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#117

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…

high-rep users sneer at it

That sneering and the general idea that some questions are worthy and others not is one of the most offputting things about SE, followed by duplicative and unhelpful me-too answers that are very obvious reputation farming. When I took up programming again after a long hiatus I found SE very helpful at first but got sick of it within a matter of months because the meta game/* is horrible.

* the social dynamics in a community driven website that are wholly orthogonal to and often end up subverting the site's stated purpose by leveraging the stated ethos and decision infrastructure in pursuit of selfish ends. Other examples include Wikipedia edit wars or abusive forms of legalism and political brinksmanship.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#118

I would really like to see what Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, the original creators of Stack Overflow, have to say about the current state of affairs. Their business model was recruiting by identifying people with specific skills, and it was effective. I hired and was hired that way. (They sold it years ago to a South African private equity venture and made the pile of money they deserved.)

I think it was not really making money the whole time they operated it though and the job finding angle wasn’t really making that much money, neither was the private enterprise SO thing

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#119
I mean fine, write an article that overweights recent events to weave a tale of the decline of Stack Exchange...but don't leave out the moderator strike, the data dump fiasco, or the CEO that simply doesn't get it. Jon Ericson's writing on the issue is much more informative. https://jlericson.com/

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#120
This is a bit pedantic, but there is a difference between:

1. Stack Exchange, a network of Q&A sites built around a single model

2. Stack Overflow, a specific Q&A site for questions about programming, on which that network was founded

Programming- and computing-related SE sites are the most popular, but they are not the only ones. ChatGPT cannot read a circuit schematic, should not be used for legal questions, probably won't recognize an obscure science fiction book based on one plot element you hazily remember, and in general is not a reliable expert in anything.

I say this is pedantic because if the programming sites "decline" they'll probably take the rest of the network with them, but as a long time denizen of EE.SE I would like if it people at least recognized that SE is used for more interesting things than "how do I do [basic programming task X]?".

Post reply on HN