Gee...I wonder why it's almost dead (again)?
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
181–190 of 1001 posts
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#182I'd still use SO at times if it weren't for how terribly it was managed and moderated. It offers features that LLMs can't, and I actually enjoyed answering questions enough to do it quite often at one time. These days I don't even think about it.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#183Not a big surprise once LLMs came along: stack overflow developed some pretty unpleasant traits over time. Everything from legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers. For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.
Oh yeah.
My favorite feature of LLMs, is the only dumb question, is the one I don't ask.
I guess someone could train an LLM to be spiteful and nasty, but that would only be for entertainment.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seemed like for every other question, I received unsolicited advice telling me how I shouldn't be doing it this way, only for me to have to explain why I wanted to do it this way (with silence from them).
Oh I love that game! (At least I think it's a game) You ask how to do X. Member M asks why you want to do X. Because you want to do Y. Well!? why do you want to do Y?? Because Y is on T and you can't do K so you need a Z Well! Well! Why do you even use Z?? Clearly J is the way it is now recommended! Because Z doesn't work on a FIPS environment. ... Can you help me? ... I just spent 15 minutes explaining X, Y and Z. D…
Tbf the problem there is probably FIPS more than anything else.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#185Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#186I guess I'm the only one that was a fan of SO's moderation. I never got too deep into it (answered some TypeScript questions). But the intention to reduce duped questions made a lot of sense to me. I like the idea of a "living document" where energy is focused on updating and improving answers to old versions of the same question. As a user looking for answers it means I can worry less about finding some other variat…
The problem with duplicate questions is that they weren't duplicates at all, and mods weren't competent enough to tell a difference.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
>For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better But LLMs get their answers from StackOverflow and similar places being used as the source material. As those start getting outdated because of lack of activity, LLMs won't have the source material to answer questions properly.
StackOverflow answers are outdated. Every time I end up on that site these days, I find myself reading answers from 12 years ago that are no longer relevant.
I see plenty of old answers that are still very relevant. Suppose it depends on what language/tech tags you follow.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I personally stopped contributing to StackOverflow before LLMs, because of the toxic moderation. Now with LLMs, I can't remember the last time I visited StackOverflow.
People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is. The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. Meanwhile, "how do I concat a string" gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes. The incentive/reward structure punished experienced folks with chal…
This has been my experience.
My initial (most popular) questions (and I asked almost twice as many questions, as I gave answers) were pretty basic, but they started getting a lot more difficult, as time went on, and they became unanswered, almost always (I often ended up answering my own question, after I figured it out on my own).
I was pretty pissed at this, because the things I encountered, were the types of things that people who ship, encounter; not academic exercises.
Tells me that, for all the bluster, a lot of folks on there, don't ship.
LLMs may sometimes give pretty sloppy answers, but they are almost always ship-relevant.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#189The SO mission is complete. It's now an LLM training set.
Things would be different if we didn't.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I personally stopped contributing to StackOverflow before LLMs, because of the toxic moderation. Now with LLMs, I can't remember the last time I visited StackOverflow.
People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is. The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. Meanwhile, "how do I concat a string" gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes. The incentive/reward structure punished experienced folks with chal…
That might be true on Stackoverflow but not on other network sites like Cross Validated, which was killed by splitting the community into multiple SE sites and longtime users quitting in protest over various policies and not being replaced.