People are mentioning the politicization of moderation. But also don’t forget when Joel broke the rules to use the site to push his personal political agenda.
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
251–260 of 1001 posts
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#252Here’s how SO could still be useful in the LLM era:
User asks a question, llm provides an immediate answer/reply on the forum. But real people can still jump in to the conversation to add additional insights and correct mistakes.
If you’re a user that asks a duplicate question, it’ll just direct you to the good conversation that already happened.
A symbiosis of immediate usually-good-enough llm answers PLUS human generated content that dives deeper and provides reassurances in correctness
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#253Between 2017 and 2022 (pre-LLM), it appears to show a clear downward trend, ignoring the covid surge. Any ideas why this might be? The query also filters to PostTypeId = 1, what does this refer to?
PostTypeId = 1 means "only select questions."
2 would be answers.
There is a bunch more of further post types: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/2678
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#254Lots 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
Hate to argue with people on the internet, but your graph doesn't actually show what you claim. The TeX data was stable until late 2021, whereas the SO decline started in 2017. I also would expect some correlation so that SO was a drag on the TeX site.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#255Lots 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
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Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#256For those who miss SO, check out Stack Overflow Simulator: A functional museum for developers to relive the good ol' days of asking innocent questions and being told to "RTFM"
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#257They will no doubt blame this on AI, somehow (ChatGPT release: late 2022, decline start: mid 2020), instead of the toxicity of the community and the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design. PS - This comment is closed as a [duplicate] of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482620
I wonder what is the role of moderating duplicate questions. More time passes - more existing data there is and less need for new questions. If you moderate duplicate questions, will they disappear from these charts? Is this decline actually logical?
2020 there was new CEO and moderator council was formed: https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/01/21/scripting-the-future-o...
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#258Some 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…
Thinking from first principles, a large part of the content on stack overflow comes from the practical experience and battle scars worn by developers sharing them with others and cross-curating approaches. Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc. It will be this shared interlocutor with vast swaths of experiential knowled…
Am I the only one that sees this as a hellscape?
No longer interacting with your peers but an LLM instead? The knowledge centralized via telemetry and spying on every user’s every interaction and only available thru a enshitified subscription to a model that’s been trained on this stolen data?
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
>> Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc Read carefully and paraphrase to the generous side. The metaphor that follows that is obviously trying to give an example of what might be somehow lost.
This is a fair critique. I am often not generous enough with people.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#260Earlier 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…
To be fair, asking why someone wants to do something is often a good question. Especially in places like StackOverflow where the people asking questions are often inexperienced.
I see it all the time professionally too. People ask "how do I do X" and I tell them. Then later on I find out that the reason they're asking is because they went down a whole rabbit hole they didn't need to go down.
An analogy I like is imagine you're organising a hike up a mountain. There's a gondola that takes you to the top on the other side, but you arrange hikes for people that like hiking. You get a group of tourists and they're all ready to hike. Then before you set off you ask the question "so, what brings you hiking today" and someone from the group says "I want to get to the top of the mountain and see the sights, I hate hiking but it is what it is". And then you say "if you take a 15 minute drive through the mountain there's a gondola on the other side". And the person thanks you and goes on their way because they didn't know there was a gondola. They just assumed hiking was the only way up. You would have been happy hiking them up the mountain but by asking the question you realised that they didn't know there was an easier way up.
It just goes back to first principles.
The truth is sometimes people decide what the solution looks like and then ask for help implementing that solution. But the solution they chose was often the wrong solution to begin with.