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Stack Overflow is almost dead

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Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#171

Post by Agraillo »

IvyMike wrote: post #21

How will ChatGPT learn the next computer language now?

From my perspective LLMs shine in programming languages because they (languages) are invented by people to be more formal so they are more predictable. Even for syntactically different programming languages there are similarities we don't see with our own eyes, but the training has no problem detecting. My favorite example is when I tried to find how to represent an int array for reflection in Kotlin. Ask ChatGPT or a sufficiently large model about this, the answer will be IntArray::class.java , but try to find the exact line with google - few or nothing, more on github search in the sources, still not much. So LLMs "detected" the system of making type signatures in Java/Kotlin and were able to successfully predict because the rules are consistent. In human language it also works, but to a lesser degree, so if you give it a verb/subject pair that makes sense and ask for the equivalent ones, you will get some that still make sense but are literally absent in the full corpus of the web.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#172

Post by spjt »

It will neither be the first or last site destroyed by hamfisted power tripping overmoderation. And they do it in the worst possible way - Leaving the question up, but preventing anyone from answering it. So, the default experience with SO becomes finding your question already asked and unanswered.

Still, it may find its place as a last resort.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#173

Post by Arnt »

kulahan wrote: post #80
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…

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.

I answer questions for a few tags, know the styles of the other people who answer on those tags, and I do consider my fellow answerers as kind. All of them.

That doesn't mean that you will think we're kind to you personally. We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that single person, and we're not there for that. We write answers for the tens, hundreds, thousands of people who will search for it.

Askers who misunderstand will come across as overly entitled.

In terms of practical effects: People who misunderstand don't tag their questions, or tag them incorrectly. They post screenshots full of text. They don't look for similar older questions in the existing knowledge base, or they insist that even slightly different questions are significantly different. All rather offputting, and often puzzling. How can you ask for a subject expert's help and simultaneously insist that you know better than the expert whether your question is a duplicate of another?

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#174

Post by palata »

zahlman wrote: post #138
palata wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... And? And as far as I can see, it is dying. > If the amount of questions went to zero per day I would still not consider this a problem. So on the one hand you find it okay to delete old questions, and on the other hand you find it okay to not add new questions. But it's not dying. > it would become easier to find what you want. It has never happened to me that I could not find what I wanted on SO because there…

> And as far as I can see, it is dying. And why are you the one who gets to make this judgment? > So on the one hand you find it okay to delete old questions, and on the other hand you find it okay to not add new questions. But it's not dying. Yes. You write this as though you think there is a contradiction here. I genuinely don't understand why. There is no contradiction here. QuickDraw wasn't "injured" when it lost…

> it's not hard to distinguish between "this person can barely write coherent English" and "I don't know anything about this technology"

Sorry, I hadn't realised I could barely write coherent English.

> QuickDraw wasn't "injured" when it lost 2000 lines of code, either

Talking about writing coherent English, what the hell does this have to do with the current discussion?

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#175

Post by palata »

zahlman wrote: post #134
palata wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people who have been around for 10 years or so who disagree with the basics of question closing policy [...] Because they flood the site with inherently low-quality answers to low-quality questions I see that you just don't hear the complaints. I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions.

> I don't hear people who have been around for 10 years or so complaining because they can't answer to low-quality questions. Because they usually can . There aren't enough curators paying attention. Stopping them generally requires three curators to find the same question and act on it before an answer is posted. And the person writing the answer also gets a grace period for in-flight answers. Then when they finally…

> Because they usually can.

I wonder if I can't write coherent English, or if you can't understand it. You keep fighting to not understand what people complain about.

They complain about good questions being closed, you say "that's because they are bad questions". They say that they don't complain about bad questions being close, you say "that's because we don't close bad questions".

Sure sounds like you don't really know what you are trying to say other than "we are great".

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#176

Post by spjt »

ndneighbor wrote: post #81

My day job includes moderation. I think I am more empathetic to the issues that moderators deal with on a day to day basis given that they are underpaid, under-appreciated, and overworked. It's very difficult to scale a community to be both welcoming and productive. New users don't have the same context as existing ones. You find that norms and manners aren't transferred from one group to the next. So although that I…

I'm not very sympathetic to moderators. Their job is to make some forum contain only what they want to hear from the (unpaid) people providing the content. If that's what you want, start a blog.

In any sort of IRL community, if some person decided they had the authority to prevent people from answering others' questions, unilaterally decide people aren't welcome, etc. everyone would think they had gone insane.

However there is the problem where any unmoderated public forum will eventually contain only scam artists and Nazis. Moderators address the Nazi spam problem, but now you have the moderator problem. It's been a mental side project of mine lately to find ways to solve the moderator problem, which I can't talk too much about as there is money to be made by doing so.

What happens when the forum gets overrun by Nazi spam? We'll install a set of moderators who remove it. But what happens when the moderators start removing useful information? We simply unleash wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the moderators. But aren't the snakes even worse? Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat. Then we're stuck with gorillas! No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#177

Post by gabrielhidasy »

The article talks about the number of questions asked in SO, but there are no mentions of visualizations.

Feels natural that after 16 years of refinements, most normal questions are already there. I use it every week, but can count on one hand the number of questions I asked (0 through my account) over 12 years of having an account. ~All my questions were already asked.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#178

Post by stormblooperz »

Arnt wrote: post #173
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.

I answer questions for a few tags, know the styles of the other people who answer on those tags, and I do consider my fellow answerers as kind. All of them. That doesn't mean that you will think we're kind to you personally. We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that si…

Reading between the lines, this is extremely telling. Of course, nobody is a villain in their own story. Members of online communities who drive others away are often just simply blind to the impact they are having - an existential impact in the case of Stack Overflow sadly.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#179

Post by dinfinity »

dragonwriter wrote: post #108
dinfinity wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This, in turn, leaves "AI" implementations with no new human content to feed off of. Now what? You seem to be under the impression that AI needs more than all recorded human knowledge up until 2024 to reach the same level as an average SO contributor. It doesn't. Because none of the average SO contributors did. It is unclear what algorithmic improvements are required to leverage the available data to get AI to AGI,…

> You seem to be under the impression that AI needs more than all recorded human knowledge up until 2024 to reach the same level as an average SO contributor. Replacing the average SO cobtributor isn't adequate to replace SO, and AI is able to “replace” SO effectively only since major models have gotten not only SO-as-training-data but web search (including SO) for immediate grounding. And without SO or something lik…

You're not addressing my main point, which is that humans don't need anything close to the amount of relevant data available to current and near future AI to reach SO contributor level. The idea that the lack of new human synthesized Stackoverflow data must be a future bottleneck is thus nonsense.

Don't pretend that the current state of LLM training is somehow indicative of a fundamental problem for AI.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#180

Post by Arnt »

stormblooperz wrote: post #178
Arnt wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I answer questions for a few tags, know the styles of the other people who answer on those tags, and I do consider my fellow answerers as kind. All of them. That doesn't mean that you will think we're kind to you personally. We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that si…

Reading between the lines, this is extremely telling. Of course, nobody is a villain in their own story. Members of online communities who drive others away are often just simply blind to the impact they are having - an existential impact in the case of Stack Overflow sadly.

Bah. I volunteer to do x and if you try to read some duty to also volunteer for y between the lines, you can do y yourself. If you expect kindness to someone I don't care to help, go on, show that kindness by doing y yourself.

Nobody pays us answerers to do what we do. The key prerogative of a volunteer is that the volunteer alone chooses what to volunteer for.

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