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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

#281

Post by 0xfaded »

zellyn wrote: post #247
0xfaded wrote: post #225

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…

Please, start a blog! Hugo + GitHub hosting makes it laughably simple. (Or pick a different stack; that’s just mine.) Even if you’re worried it’ll be sparse and crappy, isn’t an Internet full of idiosyncratic personal blogs what we all want? If you want help or encouragement, reach out: zellyn@ most places

It's been a long time, but here is the writeup https://blog.chatfield.io/simple-method-for-distance-to-elli...

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#282

Post by stackghost »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #258
omneity wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The UX sounds better than Stack Overflow.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#283

Post by hahn-kev »

gfhifd42 wrote: post #133
nospice wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. I often end up on Stack Exchange when researching various engineering-related topics, and I'm always blown away by how incredibly toxic the threads are. We get small glimpses of that on HN, but it was absolutely out of control on Stack Exchange. At the same time, I think there was another factor: at some point, the corpus of answered questions has grown to a point where you no longer needed to ask, because by…

[flagged]

This response sounds quite toxic actually

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#284

Post by deadbabe »

StackOverflow cemented my fears of asking questions. Even though there were no results for what I needed, I was too afraid to ask.

Good riddance, now I’m never afraid to ask dumb questions to LLM and I’ve learned a lot more with no stress of judgement.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#285

Post by hahn-kev »

Alex2037 wrote: post #265
gfhifd42 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

what the fuck are you talking about? SO, remarkably, did not get enshittified.

Yeah I agree, it did fail, but it's not worse because the people running it were trying to ring money out of it's users. Maybe they did take their eye off the ball trying to make it something else though

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#286

Post by Ajedi32 »

why-o-why wrote: post #246
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.

And you can't delete your post when you realize how awful it was years later! That anti-information sticks around for ages. Even worse when there are bad answers attached to it, too.

If you're talking about deleting questions, that's because deleting the question would delete everyone's answers that they potentially worked very hard on and which others might find useful. If you think the answers are bad you can always post your own competing answer.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#287

Post by rapidfl »

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…

> SO was by far the leading source of high quality answers to technical questions

We will arrive on most answers by talking to an LLM. Many of us have an idea about we want. We relied on SO for some details/quirks/gotchas.

Example of a common SO question: how to do x in a library or language or platform? Maybe post on the Github for that lib. Or forums.. there are quirky systems like Salesforce or Workday which have robust forums. Where the forums are still much more effective than LLMs.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#288

Post by m463 »

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…

Too bad stack overflow didn't high-quality-LLM itself early. I assume it had the computer-related brainpower.

with respect to the "moderation is the cause" thing... Although I also don't buy moderation as the cause, I wonder if any sort of friction from the "primary source of data" can cause acceleration.

for example, when I'm doing an interenet search for the definition of a word like buggywhip, some search results from the "primary source" show:

> buggy whip, n. meanings, etymology and more | Oxford English Dictionary

> Factsheet What does the noun buggy whip mean? There is one meaning in OED's entry for the noun buggy whip. See 'Meaning & use' for definition, usage, and quotation evidence.

which are non-answer to keep their traffic.

but the AI answer is... the answer.

If SO early on had had some clear AI answer + references, I think that would have kept people on their site.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#289

Post by ianbutler »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #221
ianbutler wrote: post #193

Earlier 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.

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.

For the record I was interpreting that as LLMs are useless (which may have been just as uncharitable), which I categorically deny. I would say they're about just as useful without wading through the mire that SO was.
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