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Stack Overflow is almost dead

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#111

Post by trial3 »

bloppe wrote: post #97
Funes- wrote: post #85

How ironic. "AI" feeds off structured knowledge, artistic creations and otherwise any human production to generate its output. As a consequence of its widespread adoption, people start to lean even more towards consuming rather than producing, a tendency which was already increasing before the advent of LLMs and modern machine-learning. This, in turn, leaves "AI" implementations with no new human content to feed off…

Perhaps the next step is having the LLMs ask questions on SO when they routinely fumble particular topics. I could see a system of knowledge bounties where people are compensated for providing accurate, in-depth training data on niche topics.

you’re one or two additional sentences away from the plot to The Matrix

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#112

Post by zahlman »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #100
kulahan wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard someone describe the stack overflow community as “kind”. Usually it’s the exact opposite: “I asked a question and just got 30 questions asking why I’m trying to do this” or “my question was closed for seemingly no reason”. It’s literally the most blunt and aggressive website I’ve ever been on that wasn’t a straight-up troll site like 4-Chan.

Yep, believe it's a direct result of Atwood's iron-fisted no-bullshit policy. To some extent it is great... don't want it turning into Yahoo Answers, do we? I think folks forget about that part. But, as you mention they just went too damn far with the medicine. No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/

>No, you can't fix this misspelling, isn't there something else (with more characters) that you can improve as well? WTF, for realz? :-/

I agree this complaint is legitimate. The problem is that the system expects unprivileged users to have their edits reviewed by three privileged users in a queue (so that people actually pay attention and vandalism doesn't just go unnoticed for months), so this is meant to limit the drain on that resource.

You may be interested in my answer to "Reviewer overboard! Or a request to improve the onboarding guidance for new reviewers in the suggested edits queue" on the meta site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/420357/523612).

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#113

Post by zahlman »

1123581321 wrote: post #66
aquafox wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until there is a radically new version of {popular programming language} with breaking changes and no new and correct answers to train on.

These models can figure out syntax and language features they haven’t seen before. Try it with a few code snippets of your own made-up language. It’s a little freaky.

They can implicitly assume that your made-up language is designed to be easy to use by native language speakers, and thus apply their existing understanding of "code" to it, sure.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#114

Post by timewizard »

bawolff wrote: post #68
timewizard wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well.. if given the right prompt.. it will effectively fully reproduce a stack overflow post in it's original form then there is no controversy and we can all see plainly what's going on behind the scenes.

Will it actually? There have certainly been incidents of that sort of thing, but from what i understand people have not been able to reliably make that happen for specific posts .

Define "it."

And yes. I've gotten many free LLM tools and demos to fully recreate stack overflow posts or blog articles. They seem to have a habit of copying comments verbatim which is usually good token to search for to find the original "inspiration."

It pretty reliably does this. The simpler the program you ask for the more likely it is to just copy one. Which we can argue that the simpler the program the fewer the plausible implementations but when it copies the comments so exactly and positions them identically then there aren't any other conclusions to reach.

The current set of "AI" companies are just in the business of whitewashing copyright violations.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#115

Post by zahlman »

palata wrote: post #93
zahlman wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the current StackOverflow moderators Overwhelmingly, the people you're talking about are not moderators. I explained this to someone else a week ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43927665 ) and you replied to that comment. > Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing So what? Stack Overflow users get $0.00 for this, whether they're moderators, active curators or just signed up. For users, growing the…

> Overwhelmingly, the people you're talking about are not moderators. I was actually thinking about you. You keep saying everything is great. My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add (more than ever, actually). > Why should a reduction in incoming questions mean that it's "dying"? There is "a reduction", and there is "be…

>You keep saying everything is great.

I say it's fine, because it is. I say that a reduction in question volume has advantages in terms of accomplishing the site's goals, because it does.

There are many things about the site that I'm unhappy with, mainly to do with initiatives the staff are taking that are also very much not true to the site's goals or purpose.

> My observation is that I used to be on SO every day, and I completely stopped contributing even though I would have plenty of stuff to add

... And?

> There is "a reduction", and there is "being back to the amount of questions SO had in 2009 when it launched".

If the amount of questions went to zero per day I would still not consider this a problem. It would be an opportunity to refine the existing publicly visible questions.

As a reminder: there are already more than three times as many of those as there are articles on Wikipedia. You say it's a problem that we don't see thousands more per day like we used to. I say it's a problem that we already have so many; and that if we had perhaps a tenth as many, it would become easier to find what you want.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#116

Post by myvoiceismypass »

moribvndvs wrote: post #32
louison11 wrote: post #12

My heart goes to the stack overflow community which has always been very kind and helpful, essentially working for free. As a self-taught developer since the age of 8, I literally grew up learning how to code through SO, asking hundreds of questions and answering many more. So many bugs that would take 2-3 days to fix would eventually find their answer through it. But now ChatGPT does that in minutes… so it’s for the…

The presumption is that things will improve over time, but the big difference in my experience is the assistance I got from SO _worked_ the vast majority of the time, whereas various LLMs I have used generate unusable, misleading, or unreliable results pretty regularly, increasing as complexity or rarity arises. As human-driven knowledge bases backed by actual experience are replaced by inference from models who rely…

Personally, I am getting extremely tired of ChatGPT hallucinating npm packages that don't exist, or package imports that do not exist

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#117

Post by cadamsdotcom »

All things have their time.

Some get superseded.

Others accelerate their decline through self-foot-shooting and/or enshittification.

Stack Overflow's journey into obscurity is via a mix of private equity indifference, better docs elsewhere, and a lack of leadership over its moderators. It was in decline long before LLMs.

It is not a new story - but it does help map out the modes of platform senescence.

Wasn't the first; won't be the last.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#118

Post by zahlman »

palata wrote: post #95
zahlman wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even with the beginnings of computer aided flows we didn't need to alienate most to get the best content and develop the few. The large majority of new questions from new accounts are from people who are clearly there only to solve a personal problem, who show no interest in considering the value of their question to third parties, and rarely put any effort into attempting to even diagnose or specify a problem. Eve…

> So yes, we absolutely do need to "alienate most", because "most" are there for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with getting the best content. How many of the "desirable" contributors did you alienate in the process? I may be naive, but when people say "I have been using SO for 10 years but it has become toxic so I left", it doesn't sound like new accounts asking for their homeworks.

The people who have been around for 10 years or so who disagree with the basics of question closing policy (or who act without any apparent awareness of it) are even worse than the people seeking a quick fix for their problem. Because they flood the site with inherently low-quality answers to low-quality questions. In doing so, they dilute higher quality content (it becomes harder to find with search engines, because search engines have no way to understand our internal quality rating systems) and incentivize the quick-fix-seekers. Both sides of that are ignoring policy and acting against the site's goal.

When people describe something as "toxic" I generally consider this to be content-less without further elaboration. It doesn't concretely describe what is supposedly wrong - it only dramatizes the complaint.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#119

Post by swat535 »

kulahan wrote: post #86
TremendousJudge wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But now ChatGPT does that in minutes But it's trained on stackoverflow data? What happens in a few years when the data gets more and more outdated? Where will it get its knowledge then?

Why does any LLM need new information to do fundamentally the same thing? And what makes the data outdated? New code? It can train on that. That, or there is simply nothing new to learn, just new ways to express the same thing.

> Why does any LLM need new information to do fundamentally the same thing?

What makes you think we will be doing fundamentally the same thing in the future? Language grow and change, systems change, operating systems change, hardware and specs change..

Nothing in computing is ever static.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#120

Post by bitbasher »

louison11 wrote: post #12

My heart goes to the stack overflow community which has always been very kind and helpful, essentially working for free. As a self-taught developer since the age of 8, I literally grew up learning how to code through SO, asking hundreds of questions and answering many more. So many bugs that would take 2-3 days to fix would eventually find their answer through it. But now ChatGPT does that in minutes… so it’s for the…

Are you talking about Stackoverflow? Every time I asked a detailed question it would be closed within minutes.

I'm not surprised it's on the way out.

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