Forum? What forum? When has Stack Overflow ever been a forum?
The current owners have sure been trying to turn it into one with half-assed "features" like open ended questions and the thankfully killed off (for now) beta redesign.
Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
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Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#122One thing I've been curious about is how the other sites on StackExchange have fared. A lot of those are pretty interesting. Anecdotally the few that I check occasionally also seem to have declined a lot.
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO it was a combination of moderators and users Sure, the mods were not always the best on SO. But even if you did ask a question, you had to deal with a userbase that was more pedantic and judgy than Reddit. Usually you would get an answer if it was obvious, other times you would have to defend your question against some guy whose newfound obsession was whether you had an XY Problem. Or who was personally offended…
It's hard for me to imagine a user base more pedantic and judgy than reddit. It must have been really bad.
Closing a question as a duplicate because there is already a question with similar wording (but assuming an entirely different tech stack, architecture, coding style, and goal) is a frequent enough experience that it became shorthand for the site's problems.
There was kind of a fatal mis-match between the questions being asked and the intended kind of questions that were being answered. The actual asks were often incomplete diagnostics of the questioner's current problem, frequently focusing on the wrong thing (because if you don't have the full knowledge of the thing you're going to be prone to incorrect assumptions of the diagnosis). SO's intent, though, was a more mathematical "here's the question, here's the programming concept that explains it" so you get the best explanation of how a linked list works under a completely unrelated problem. Which is fine, but the site's culture and design only partially acknowledged the disconnect.
The whole site developed a reputation of being something approximating the reverse of the comments under recipes that substitute lard for cream and wonder why their cake tastes funny. Lots of questions of "How do I implement this functionality in Y? We can't change our tech stack because of other factors, so it has to be Y" questions answered by "If you just use Z instead you wouldn't have these problems" and "closed as a duplicate of this question for how to implement the non-Y version" when there was a perfectly fine way to do it in Y.
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#124The author labels COVID and the launch of ChatGPT on the graph, but fails to mention that Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm. That looks to me like it matches pretty well with the entire downward trend.
I don't think so. StackOverflow itself didn't really change for any of that period. Any changes in users must have been due to external factors.
hmm, I got rid of WhatsApp the day it was sold to Facebook and never touched it since. I don't think anything in the app changed that day.
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#125This is happening to Reddit too, albeit in a different way. Almost every other comment on popular subreddits is from surreptitious LLM bots.
Every other post too. At this point it is quite challenging to find a genuine human interaction on popular online sites.
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#126This is happening to Reddit too, albeit in a different way. Almost every other comment on popular subreddits is from surreptitious LLM bots.
I feel reddit is having a near death moment. There are prowling bots trying to strike up engagement with stupid open ended questions "do you find that using a golf simulator improved your golf?" And some subs seem infested with submarine advertising, posts that mention a single product name almost in passing. Nearly always these people have their posts hidden. Reddit has always been looser, people can edit and delete…
I've seen people on reddit having entire conversations with clearly bots, often on a post clearly written by a bot itself. I am sure some people are disgusted by that (I am certainly not a fan), but it seems that many are fine, or who knows, maybe it was even other bots.
I suppose there could be a tipping point if enough people leave and genuine interaction becomes rare that it will be too obvious, but at this point I don't know. But I am on a brink of quitting reddit, nearly all popular subs I like are AI-infested and it is just exhausting.
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#127There are a lot of reasons why that forum is dead. I loved answering questions on it in the heyday, it was fun and I learned a ton. The owners let a bunch "admins" run it into the ground first though.
Another user that "outranks" you, but knows nothing about subject matter, has changed the content of your post. The great news is, it's still attributed to you. They removed the words "please" and "thank you" and other kind words to make you seem like a dick. Or they may have changed the wording completely to match their completely arbitrary tone and style. Have a nice day and kindly piss off, there's nothing you can do about it, hah, loser.
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#128Discussion when the source article is from: January.
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#129I knew that stack overflow must be suffering because of AI, but I find it hard to believe that questions asked per month has gone from 200k pre-chatbot to (what appears to be) ~1k. Although, I suppose I have not gone there at all in the last 4 years...
It makes sense to me. There's literally no use for Stack Overflow anymore. LLMs, for all their faults, are a far better way to get answers to coding problems.
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel reddit is having a near death moment. There are prowling bots trying to strike up engagement with stupid open ended questions "do you find that using a golf simulator improved your golf?" And some subs seem infested with submarine advertising, posts that mention a single product name almost in passing. Nearly always these people have their posts hidden. Reddit has always been looser, people can edit and delete…
I've seen people on reddit having entire conversations with clearly bots, often on a post clearly written by a bot itself. I am sure some people are disgusted by that (I am certainly not a fan), but it seems that many are fine, or who knows, maybe it was even other bots. I suppose there could be a tipping point if enough people leave and genuine interaction becomes rare that it will be too obvious, but at this point…
It could be there's a fork in the road for reddit.
Some people are probably fine, even happy, immersing themselves in an all-bot world that panders to their worldview and strokes their virtual needs.
While others are looking for thought provoking interactions with humans.
Reddit needs to pick one or the other as their target audience. Trying to satisfy both will kill them.
Solving their bot problem would obviously nuke their audience and engagement metrics, but reddit is in a unique position to take that hit - at this time anyway.