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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

#181

Post by mandevil »

bjourne wrote: post #164
mattmanser wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

The reason that duplicates were treated as dangerous was that SO viewed their most important user not as anyone you have mentioned but instead they prized the lurker most- the person who typed their problem into Google and got brought to SO, and never asked or answered a question because they got what they wanted from that one page load. The entire structure of SO was built around this user.

So why does that mean that duplicates are dangerous? Because of updates. When someone answered a question about how to do something in Python (but it was 2008 so it was written in Python2) SO had ways to get a more correct, up-to-date answer to that question written in 2015 (and then again in 2019) and get that upvoted, and moderators could reward that new answer by editing the original etc.

That is why duplicates were a major threat: if the same question is asked and answered thousands of times, no one is going to go do the work to update all of those answers all across the site. Those lurkers are now dependent on the whims of Google as to which of the many answers you get taken to, and whether it has the latest answer or some answer that stopped working years ago.

And that is why they were so hostile to duplicate questions.

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

#182

Post by xtracto »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #176

> Large language models want data about coding problems and how to solve them. Stack Overflow has a big digital warehouse full of that, but it’s increasingly aging, as queries move into private chat windows with LLM models. What are the llm going to feed on when coding languages change and there isn't anymore stackoverflow or these kind of forum ? Surely it can read the documentation but it's not enough, you need dat…

Within a couple of years, LLMs or equivalent AI engines will have the ability to generate factual knowledge themselves using their "outdated" knowledge and their reasoning mechanisms.

For example, one of the classical requests from S.O. questions and GitHub issues is a "minimal reproducible example " of the question/problem.

So a sufficiently advanced AI will be able to write that, run it, see the issue , go to the library/related-system code or documentation (for closed source) and derive a solution

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

#183

Post by lokar »

mathattack wrote: post #83
andomar wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A firm is sold when its owners believe they will get the best price. The selling itself is more of a symptom than a cause.

It’s not necessarily the sale. Some private equity companies move from “Let’s invest like we’re shooting for the moon” to “Let’s invest like we want to improve margins and flip this on 3-5 years” It’s not inherently wrong but it is a different model, and sometimes companies suffer as a result.

And some (Broadcom) see a product in decline, but with some amount of stickiness/lock-in. They cut R&D and extract value as it withers away.

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

#184

Post by stackghost »

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?

I'm sure the AI companies will continue to pirate textbooks and papers, like always.

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

#185

Post by Olumde »

crispyambulance wrote: post #173

Good riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times. Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others. Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does no…

The CUDA tag too had a vigilante whose profile read

> Once upon a time there was a emerging technology called CUDA, which offered all sorts of really intriguing new possibilities in scientific and parallel computation. And once upon a time, Stack Overflow was full of interesting questions about CUDA, and how to use it. So I started answering them. Eventually I answered almost 700 questions, became Stack Overflow's highest reputation participant on the CUDA tag, and had a lot of fun doing it.

> Alas, CUDA is now very mature and most of the good questions about CUDA have already been asked and answered. What appears on Stack Overflow today is mostly dross, and I spend most of my time editing, down-voting and closing rather than answering questions. Those answers I add are community wiki entries (over 200 300 400 500 600 700 at the time of writing). A lot of toil has gotten and kept the unanswered question queue down to about 10% 7% 4% 3% of the total number of CUDA questions for a good part of my tenure here.

Result, most CUDA questions got downvoted and then deleted. Oddly though CUDA continues to evolve.

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

#186

Post by hungryhobbit »

mandevil wrote: post #181
bjourne wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

The reason that duplicates were treated as dangerous was that SO viewed their most important user not as anyone you have mentioned but instead they prized the lurker most- the person who typed their problem into Google and got brought to SO, and never asked or answered a question because they got what they wanted from that one page load. The entire structure of SO was built around this user. So why does that mean tha…

But in trying to solve that problem, they threw the baby out with the bathwater!

They were so fixated on solving that that they failed to realize: training all their power users to grief anyone who didn't behave like a power user off the site was detrimental (to having a site with non-power users). Everyone came for a question and answer site, but when it transformed it into a "question and get downvoted and modded into oblivion" site, everyone left.

AI put the final nail in the coffin, but SO was dead before AI arrived ... from this self-inflicted wound.

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

#187

Post by kstrauser »

theSuda wrote: post #155
throawayonthe wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

getting a wrong answer in a public forum can be great to motivate corrections :p

I am also going to miss searching for something, finding a stack overflow thread and noticing that I wrote that answer years ago. :)

That was always fun! And a few times, coworkers told me they asked a question there and found that I'd answered it. That was kinda nice.

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

#188

Post by kstrauser »

theSuda wrote: post #155
throawayonthe wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

getting a wrong answer in a public forum can be great to motivate corrections :p

I am also going to miss searching for something, finding a stack overflow thread and noticing that I wrote that answer years ago. :)

That was always fun! And a few times, coworkers told me they searched a question there and found that I'd answered it. That was kinda nice.

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

#189

Post by kstrauser »

Olumde wrote: post #185
crispyambulance wrote: post #173

Good riddance! I've used it a lot, like everybody else, and it helped me many times. Unfortunately, it developed a serious culture problem that would not go away. I suspect the gamification attracted many rigid-thinking, rule-obsessed personality types that weren't self-aware enough to realize when they hurt others. Yes, of course, they wanted good questions and useable answers. That's a good intention but it does no…

The CUDA tag too had a vigilante whose profile read > Once upon a time there was a emerging technology called CUDA, which offered all sorts of really intriguing new possibilities in scientific and parallel computation. And once upon a time, Stack Overflow was full of interesting questions about CUDA, and how to use it. So I started answering them. Eventually I answered almost 700 questions, became Stack Overflow's hi…

[flagged]

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

#190

Post by antasvara »

mandevil wrote: post #181
bjourne wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

The reason that duplicates were treated as dangerous was that SO viewed their most important user not as anyone you have mentioned but instead they prized the lurker most- the person who typed their problem into Google and got brought to SO, and never asked or answered a question because they got what they wanted from that one page load. The entire structure of SO was built around this user. So why does that mean tha…

Perfectly said.

To extend this, the eventual problem is that you eventually lose all of your new users, which means you lose the extremely valuable intermediate users (ones that know enough to ask complex questions, but not so much that they can figure out the answer).

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