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Stack Overflow is almost dead

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#181

Post by matty22 »

irrational wrote: post #75

> 2014: questions started to decline, which was also when Stack Overflow significantly improved moderator efficiency. From then, questions were closed faster, many more were closed, and “low quality” questions were removed more efficiently. This tallies with my memory of feeling that site moderators had gone on a power trip by closing legitimate questions. I stopped asking questions around this time because the site…

I didn't start learning to code until around 2014, so I didn't know SO before this change. But when you make your platform so militantly anti-helpful, militantly anti-newbie, and just all around unpleasant to interact with, then it shouldn't be a huge surprise to anyone that people stop using it. There's over half a human generation of learners who have had almost entirely negative experiences with SO.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#182

Post by umvi »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #26
umvi wrote: post #18

I suspect there will always be a place for SO-esque sites, but it will shift to be primarily for creating high quality data for ingestion by LLMs.

This is the absolute worst possible outcome! Humans toiling just to produce content to train AI on What a miserable future to look forward to

Even if you were paid to make high quality answers?

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#183

Post by stormblooperz »

Arnt wrote: post #180
stormblooperz wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This. This is exactly it.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#184

Post by Arnt »

NBJack wrote: post #94
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.

Question closed; here's a link to another one that sounds vaguely related but doesn't actually address your problem. But seriously, I'd love to see some sentiment analysis of the SO corpus classifying tone by tag.

I've closed like that. One asker complained that his question about base64 encoding in one language was not like the duplicate I identified because the language was another one. "Vaguely related", he thought, but he asked precisely because he didn't know.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#185

Post by s1ph3r »

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 moved this over to the Stackoverflow Will Be Missed thread. It does not belong in the Let's Dance On Stackoverflow's Demise thread.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#187

Post by s1ph3r »

slyfox125 wrote: post #144
zahlman wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Having your problem addressed" is not a valid reason to post on Stack Overflow. You are expected before posting to have done enough analysis to the point where if your question is answered, you can solve the underlying problem yourself. When you are linked to a duplicate, it's because the person doing so believes in good faith that, to the extent that you have a question that meets the site's standards, answers to t…

Even if you - and the stance SO takes/took - are correct, that doesn't erase the fact that the decorum is unpalatable to a vast majority of the user-base. Being correct does not necessarily engender popularity or success. Often, humility, patience, and kindness are key.

I think the appeal of SO to its users (besides getting help for programming when you find someone willing) is that its also a source of narcissistic supply for the powerusers that can be maximized due to SO's gatekeeping policies.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#188

Post by msluyter »

bfung wrote: post #10

Where will training data come from for new tech & programming languages if SO dies?

This was my question. There's a weird sort of self-cannibalism that this hints at. The LLM is only as good as it is because it's been able to train on existing SO answers. But if over time, SO content production declines, then the LLM results will be less reliable. It seems that a new equilibrium could be one in which -- for newer questions/concerns -- both SO and LLMs will be worse than they are now.

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#189

Post by bawolff »

timewizard wrote: post #114
bawolff wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will it actually? There have certainly been incidents of that sort of thing, but from what i understand people have not been able to reliably make that happen for specific posts .

Define "it." And yes. I've gotten many free LLM tools and demos to fully recreate stack overflow posts or blog articles. They seem to have a habit of copying comments verbatim which is usually good token to search for to find the original "inspiration." It pretty reliably does this. The simpler the program you ask for the more likely it is to just copy one. Which we can argue that the simpler the program the fewer th…

Sure, but copying 1 or 2 sentences verbatim into a long program probably isn't enough to win a copyright suit (de minimis). Or at least it would be pretty grey. Similarly, the simpler the program, the less likely the creative intent shines through.

(Mostly im just trying to say these things depend on the details, and the anti-AI crowd tend to handwave the details away. They might still be right, but its far from an obvious slam dunk)

Re: Stack Overflow is almost dead

#190

Post by nrdvana »

myvoiceismypass wrote: post #116
moribvndvs wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The presumption is that things will improve over time, but the big difference in my experience is the assistance I got from SO _worked_ the vast majority of the time, whereas various LLMs I have used generate unusable, misleading, or unreliable results pretty regularly, increasing as complexity or rarity arises. As human-driven knowledge bases backed by actual experience are replaced by inference from models who rely…

Personally, I am getting extremely tired of ChatGPT hallucinating npm packages that don't exist, or package imports that do not exist

But then you can just ask it to write that missing library! Some day in the future you can probably ask it to author the whole package and publish it itself.

"Oh sorry, that package doesn't exist yet, but it ought to. One moment... Ok, try installing it now."

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