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Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

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Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#121

Post by Etherlord87 »

bluetomcat wrote: post #110
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…

Not necessarily "not researched", rather "too localized". SE is not a place to ask to solve your specific problem, which will only litter the website because it will never help anyone else. Debugging and solving logical errors is one subset of that. Once the problem is about some kind of misunderstanding how some interface works, it can help others who will have a similar problem. And of course a high-level design problem is also a good question.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#122

Post by dotnet00 »

the_jeremy wrote: post #106
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 reven…

In those cases it's easy enough to just move on to another question rather than shut down the discussion. It's not like anyone's being forced to answer.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#123

Post by throw202020 »

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.

Of course I do. I use it (GPT4) every day and it's a million times better than Stack Overflow ever was. I find it extremely strange that this is not the standard now. And no, the answers are correct 99.999% of the time, so I don't know what the hell you're doing.

If it counts, I have a SO account with >15k "reputation."

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#124

Post by layer8 »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #31

Some of my most recent ChatGPT interactions: 34.223.203.0/28 what is the end ip of this range? Write python code to strip out characters that are not alphanumeric or spaces How do make FastAPI not return nulls in the response model when values don't exist? Rewrite this javascript to python Braindead stuff that I would normally lookup on StackOverflow but ChatGPT gives me the actual answer instead of me having to sift…

The benefit of “sifting through answers” on StackOverflow is that you learn about different perspectives and about possible caveats. You tend to get a more complete picture. At least for me, that makes human-discussed content much more valuable.

It’s a bit like reading HN comment threads vs. asking an LLM for its take on a submission.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#125

Post by pwdisswordfishc »

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 were to look at hundreds upon hundreds of easily-researchable questions titled "plz halp i am n00b" asked by people who didn't bother to apply a slightest amout of elementary analytic skill, you would be just as negative.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#126

Post by sam0x17 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #117
bluetomcat wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. *…

Yeah this always turned me off of contributing in earnest to SE. The purpose is supposed to be a general purpose site with an answer to _all_ questions, but in practice it's just a site with answers to questions an expert might have. Almost everything below that level of technicality gets culled.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#127

Post by robertlagrant »

at_a_remove wrote: post #94
robertlagrant wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But SO seems like an interesting case where they allow entitled behaviour of some devs to get out of control and it led to problems. This is hard to quantify, and to make objective. E.g. in a previous company HR once sent an email asking for feedback from employees, and one of my engineers gave some - polite, thoughtful, and clear. This caused quite an incident as the HR staff in question were not used to getting a…

How would you have filtered feedback that is polite, thoughtful, and clear?

Good question :-) You start by remembering that a lot of people have constant praise - they bought a new Thing™? "Well done you!" Say their friends. Or "You look sensational today!" Or whatever it is. Hyper-positive praise is very common, and any hint of anything else may well be jarring.

Any improvement suggestions might need to either get thrown in the bin (even if they're valid and simple) or filtered through their manager, or have a guided conversation so they think they came up with it.

It just depends on the person and your relationship with them, really.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#128

Post by dotnet00 »

nirvdrum wrote: post #115
duxup wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Similarly with questions about doing X with Y where the top answer just pushes some library, a different language or outright changes X to something else (without answering the original question).

I feel like the people writing those answers should also be well aware that often you can't just change the problem or just add in a library to solve one specific problem on a whim. It's kind of demeaning to push those kinds of answers anyway rather than maybe question the task but provide a solution anyway.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#129

Post by thaeli »

anigbrowl wrote: post #117
bluetomcat wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 biggest problem with SE for me, and this is related to the culture issues you're talking about, is that the site has no good way of deprecating "formerly correct" answers. Even if a better, more correct answer is posted later, the reputation system has a huge incumbency bias in favor of older answers that have accumulated upvotes by being the best available answer at the time.

Their knowledge repository is slowly rotting under the weight of having to ask every time "okay, is this correct-sounding, highly upvoted answer actually (still) correct, or is it 10 years out of date?"

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