Title of this could be more informative: Working with Stack Overflow Data to Investigate its Decline
Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
131–140 of 267 posts
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen chatgpt word for word plagiarise stack overflow answers
i've seen it plagiarize personal blog posts too, almost verbatim code line by line.... kind of shocking...
Well, it's a plagiarizing machine after all and most of the time it remixes it well enough so most people can't tell.
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone loves to say this... because it's everyone's experience. I stopped using SO as a resource years ago (well before the advent of LLMs) because it got to the point where almost invariably, when I found a post that managed to perfectly articulate my question, it was closed as a duplicate of some other, distinctly unhelpful question. But it wasn't always that way. There's a fine line between strict moderation and…
Don't forget the other way of sidetracking what you're asking for: "Why are you doing this, do something else instead." I think most of my questions ended up with this, when I had very good reasons for doing it the way I was doing it. I typically wasn't showing it because I had isolated the problem I was facing into the minimal amount of code to duplicate it, or I was stuck with the particular tech I was using and we…
Oh, yes, I remember these kinds of answers distinctly frustrating. But it was not singular to SO. Reddit had a similar vibe at times. I remember I was studying some C things back when and asked about speed and what was essentially loop unrolling. Tip answer was why do you care about speed. Bruh, I am trying to get a mental model of how this thing works.
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's the thing though, it was voluntary. If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day. I get that dealing with low quality questions wasn't great, but imagine spending an afternoon researching a weird thing using some tools your organization mandates, writing it up, only for that person to skim it and just assume you reall…
> If it isn't fun to do, and simply causes frustration, that hypothetical person constructed in the comment could just step away for the day. That frustration is likely part of the decline, yes.
And also part of the decline from the asker side, once a less abrasive alternative became available
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#135Stack Overflow had been a zombie even before they sold to Prosus in 2021. It became over-moderated and calcified.
Amongst even simple stuff, they refused to update basic library questions when said libraries had new releases with additional calls and performance enhancements.
Sometime in 2018 I went so far as to blacklist the domain so it wouldn't inadvertently pollute research.
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#136Wow. It declined all the way to zero? I'd have expected it to tail off. That's scary. What else can AI make decline all the way to zero? Customer support?
> What else can AI make decline all the way to zero?
Human facing web search. Most SaS.
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone loves to say this when the death of Stack Overflow is discussed, but it always was that way. Strict moderation, love it or hate it, was part of the platform. And it could have kept going that way for many more years if not for LLMs 99.9% obviating the need for a coding Q&A forum.
if early stackoverflow moderation was strict it was strict in a way that was invisible to people who genuinely needed the help. later on it got people who thought the strictness was the main point, and that they had to be vigilant defenders of the purity of the site (wikipedia had a similar malaise). I personally gave up on the site entirely when I saw a very valid question from an inexperienced programmer closed as…
I found this often for C# (and sometimes Typescript) related stuff... redirected to a question with a wrong/useless answer.
For Java/Python/Javascript it was also the case, but often the answer (proper way of doing things) would be in the comments lower down, probably the size of community was larger.
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#138Wouldn't this be worrisome? People used StackOverflow and generated new knowledge along the way. Without such medium for discussion, how can we feed models with up-to-date quality knowledge?
Plenty of documentation, and plenty of code that the AI can read itself. E.g. if a library has a bug that has a common workaround, it can learn that from open source code using the library that uses the workaround.
This and the the other thread that talks about RL and synthetic data seem to suggest that AI can figure out all the technical issues without humans looking into them. I'm not sure if that's true at all.
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#139I'm curious if they could pivot into a site where LLMs post questions and answer problems posted by other LLMs.
Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking
#140Thanks for this post. Unfortunately, you used the wrong word choice here and this question has 13 other answers that have some of the same words but don't really answer your particular question so it has been deleted. Also, if this remains posted, my not-on-point answer will get less views. There's more than one reason that forum is dead.
Everyone loves to say this when the death of Stack Overflow is discussed, but it always was that way. Strict moderation, love it or hate it, was part of the platform. And it could have kept going that way for many more years if not for LLMs 99.9% obviating the need for a coding Q&A forum.
yeah, everyone seems to just ellide over the ability of LLM's to scrape all of stack overflow and do the same hack and slash response.
Of fun to LLM historians: "Make no mistakes" likely triggers the LLM to look at the second comment that has a better solution but wasn't first.