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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

#161

Post by mattmanser »

jmyeet wrote: post #151
hintymad wrote: post #6

Wouldn'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?

Yeah, this is something I've been thinking about too. LLMs have basically profited from "stealing" (arguably) user-generated content from a time when there were no LLMs. In the LLM era there won't be a new Stack Overflow to train LLMs on going forward. We're getting closer to Dead Internet Theory too where a lot of accounts, particularly on Twitter, are just LLMs. I imagine it's a huge problem on Reddit too. Just peo…

It's happening here too, I saw dang hint that they're not even responding to a lot of questions about it anymore because of the volume of the problem.

If you browse with showdead on you'll be seeing a lot more of what look like reasonable comments greyed out.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#162

Post by boca_honey »

ijk wrote: post #101
dpark wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rarely posted questions on SO but I largely stopped using it as a resource because of exactly this. I got tired of searching for answers only to find closed-as-dupe questions. I feel like in their search for “quality” they completely forgot that they needed engagement to deliver value. The whole premise was that the correct answers would bubble to the top, but their system ended up pushing everyone to old questions…

Ah yes, programming: the discipline which famously only has singular right answers to problems, such that programmers never get in arguments with each other about the correct approach to solving a given problem, and there are no long running disputes that have ossified into intractable disagreements.

That basic 90's sitcom level-1 sarcasm is not helpful in any adult discussion, it's very common on engineers and technical people, and it's probably the reason SO and similar sites were being abandoned by the regular internet users before LLMs. Just say what you intent to communicate, dude. If funny is not your forte, don't force it.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#163

Post by legitster »

hintymad wrote: post #149
legitster wrote: post #82

Stack Overflow might be the greatest receptacles of human knowledge on programming. But I would argue that it usefulness only extends to its body of knowledge. As a service and/or community it has been pretty terrible for a long time: If you were a new user trying to learn programming, it was maybe one of the most toxic resources available. I don't think I have posted a question since 2019. And even there, the only t…

StackExchange is pretty friendly to beginners in my experience. I used to post straight-forward questions on math and stats on math SE and stats SE. I got answers within hours and sometimes minutes, and the answers were spot on.

Fair point! I suspect the toxicity/usefulness has a linear relationship with how well trod the particular community is.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#164

Post by bjourne »

mattmanser wrote: post #154
andrekandre wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a.k.a enshitification

That's not what we mean when we say that phrase. They actual had the eternal September problem, which they were always going to hit, but managed to stave it off for a decade or so before it became overwhelming. From your perspective as a question asker, the community was too strict. From the unpaid volunteers perspective, they were drowning in dupes.

Eternal September was never a problem for SO, it was an asset. Duplicate questions was never a problem for those asking or answering questions (I did both), only for a relatively small group of loudmouthed moderators. Now they hardly have any dupes to worry about but they also have no content to moderate!

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#165

Post by nitwit005 »

crazygringo wrote: post #73
hintymad wrote: post #6

Wouldn'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.

That assumes there is documentation or examples. A big reason Stack Overflow took off was people struggling with things like the Android API documentation.

Some of those discussions made people go figure out how to do it, and then post it as an answer. The knowledge didn't exist anywhere until they did.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#167

Post by Crimson_Fool »

Not really surprised tbh, the goal of stack overflow was to essentially help out in unique problems that users have, but ever since the advent of AI, I personally have had less and less need to go to stack overflow. The one advantage of stack overflow though, is that unlike AI where once you find the answer, its gone, in stack overflow, it can help the next guy along. Kinda feels like we are losing a bit more of the humanity aspect in engineering.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#168

Post by chiph »

bhouston wrote: post #79
jonas21 wrote: post #18

The 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.

> Stack Overflow was acquired in June 2021 by Prosus, a Dutch private equity firm., That is great to hear. I am glad that the original creators of StackOverflow got their liquidity event and are well off financially I suspect.

That would be Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek Software) and Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror), mostly. Jeff has gone on to make several large philanthropic gifts. Joel probably has too but I don't have info on them.

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#169

Post by Groxx »

calmbonsai wrote: post #135

Stack 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.

Yea, I abandoned it before then too - it was clearly over-filled with old answers with no context as to if they're still valid.

Everyone has had the experience where the top response was right for 3 months, but is now impossible to fix, so you have to just somehow know that you need the 19th answer with only 6 upvotes (versus 387). That was a problem early on, and afaict has exclusively worsened over its whole lifetime. They seem to be proud of it as if it was a major feature, and have afaict never built anything at all to try to address it.

(Yes, editing answers is "a solution", but you can't do that as a newcomer who knows better. You've got to commit to the ecosystem for months... when it had just failed you. Of course most visitors don't do that!)

Re: Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking

#170

Post by janalsncm »

smrq wrote: post #26
alach11 wrote: post #4

Earlier 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.

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…

Is it possible this is survivorship bias? Maybe other forums with much less strict moderation simply wouldn’t have survived long enough to complain about.
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