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Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

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Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#221

Post by akoboldfrying »

ianbutler wrote: post #193
paganholiday wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The example wasn't even finding a right answer so I don't see where you got that.. Searching questions/answers on SO can surface correct paths on situations where the LLMs will keep giving you variants of a few wrong solutions, kind of like the toxic duplicate closers.. Ironically, if SO pruned the history to remove all failures to match its community standards then it would have the same problem.

"But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions." > "actually answered our questions." Read carefully.

Interpreting that claim as "SO users always, 100% of the time answer questions correctly" is uncharitable to the point of being unreasonable.

Most people would interpret the claim as concisely expressing that you get better accuracy from grumpy SO users than friendly LLMs.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#222

Post by lysace »

econ wrote: post #170
lysace wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gen 0: expertsexchange.com, later experts-exchange.com (1996) Gen 1: stackoverflow.com (2008) Gen 2: chatgpt.com (2022, sort of)

Yahoo answers Google answers And the horrific Quora

None of those worked as programming tools. I really miss Google Answers though, with the bounties.

Random example:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/762357.html

It's remarkable how similar in style the answers are to what we all know from e.g. chatgpt.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#223

Post by NewsaHackO »

lysace wrote: post #93
palata wrote: post #32

Earlier 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.

Gen 0: expertsexchange.com, later experts-exchange.com (1996) Gen 1: stackoverflow.com (2008) Gen 2: chatgpt.com (2022, sort of)

>Gen 0: expertsexchange.com

No way.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#224

Post by lysace »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #223
lysace wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gen 0: expertsexchange.com, later experts-exchange.com (1996) Gen 1: stackoverflow.com (2008) Gen 2: chatgpt.com (2022, sort of)

>Gen 0: expertsexchange.com No way.

It was a more innocent time.

Proof: https://web.archive.org/web/19990429180417/http://www.expert...

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#225

Post by 0xfaded »

I once published a method for finding the closest distance between an ellipse and a point on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g...

I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations.

People used to reach out to me all the time with uses they had found for it, it was cited in a PhD and apparently lives in some collision plugin for unity. Haven't heard from anyone in a long time.

It's also my test question for LLMs, and I've yet to see my solution regurgitated. Instead they generate some variant of Newtons method, ChatGPT 5.2 gave me an LM implementation and acknowledged that Newtons method is unstable (it is, which is why I went down the rabbit hole in the first place.)

Today I don't know where I would publish such a gem. It's not something I'd bother writing up in a paper, and SO was the obvious place were people who wanted an answer to this question would look. Now there is no central repository, instead everyone individually summons the ghosts of those passed in loneliness.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#226

Post by gucci-on-fleek »

Lots of the comments here are attributing the decline to a toxic community or overly-strict moderation, but I don't think that that is the main reason. The TeX site [0] is very friendly and has somewhat looser moderation, yet it shows the exact same decline [1].

[0]: https://tex.stackexchange.com/

[1]: https://data.stackexchange.com/tex/query/1926661#graph

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#227

Post by andirk »

johnfn wrote: post #210

Some comments: - This is a really remarkable graph. I just didn't realize how thoroughly it was over for SO. It stuns me as much as when Encyclopædia Britannica stopped selling print versions a mere 9 years after the publication of Wikipedia, but at an even faster timescale. - I disagree with most comments that the brusque moderation is the cause of SO's problems, though it certainly didn't help. SO has had poor mode…

That "Dead Internet" phrase keeps becoming more likely, and this graph shows that. Human-to-human interactions, LLMs using those interactions, less human-to-human interactions because of that, LLMs using... ?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#230

Post by oofbey »

oofbey wrote: post #201
gfhifd42 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't have anything to do with LLMs. It has to do with shifting one's focus from doing good things to making money. Joel did that, and SO failed because of it. Joel promised the answering community he wouldn't sell SO out from under them, but then he did. And so the toxicity at the top trickled down into the community. Those with integrity left the community and only toxic, selfcentered people remained to destro…

How did Joel sell out? Curious as I’m not aware of any monetary changes. I watched Joel several times support completely brain dead policies in the meta discussions which really set the rules and tone. So my respect there is low.

They literally sold: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/stack-overflow-sold-...
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