The founders made the right move selling it when they did. No way that site is worth $1.8 billion now.
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
291–300 of 1001 posts
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"A Human commented at ##:##pm"
"An AI Bot commented at..."
"A suspected AI Bot commented at..."
"An unconfirmed Human commented at..."
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better. For now. They still need to be enshitted.
Models are check-pointed. You can save one you like and use it forever.
You can save an open source + open weights model, which is frozen in time. That’s still very useful for some things but lacks knowledge of current data.
So we’ll end up with a choice of low-performing stale models or high-performing enshittified models which know about more current information.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#294While AI might have amplified the end, the drop-off preceded significant AI usage for coding. So some possible reasons: - Success: all the basic questions were answered, and the complex questions are hard to ask. - Ownership: In its heyday, projects used SoF for their support channel because it meant they don't have to answer twice. Now projects prefer to isolate dependencies to github and not lose control over messa…
The volume of basic questions is unlimited. There are new technologies every year.
Not sure. As software becomes a commodity I can see the "old school" like tech slowing down (e.g. programming languages, frameworks frontend and backend, etc). The need for a better programming language is less now since LLM's are the ones writing code anyway more so these days - the pain isn't felt necessarily by the writer of the code to be more concise/expressive. The ones that do come out will probably have more specific communities for them (e.g. AI)
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
One UX experience that was clearly replaced by other services and spaces before the widespread use of AI doesn’t sound very compelling to me.
Be more creative than AI.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#296I 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…
The various admonitions to publish to a personal blog, while encouraging, don't really get at the 0xfaded's request which I'd summarize as follows: With no one asking questions these technical questions publicly, where, how and on what public platform will technical people find the problems that need solving so they can exercise their creativity for the benefit of all?
Seriously where will we get this info anymore? I’ve depended on it for decades. No matter how obscure, I could always find a community that was talking about something I needed solved. I feel like that’s getting harder and harder every year. The balkanization of the Internet + garbage AI slop blogs overwhelming the clearly declining Google is a huge problem.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seemed to me that pre-llm, google had stopped surfacing stackoverflow answers in search results.
My memory is there were a spate of SO scraping sites that google would surface above SO and google just would not zap. It would have been super trivial to fix but google didn’t. My pet theory was that google were getting doubleclick revenue from the scrapers so had incentives to let them scrape and to promote them in search results.
I remember those too! There were seemingly thousands of them!
Reminds me of my most black-hat project — a Wikipedia proxy with 2 Adsense ads injected into the page. It made me like $20-25 a month for a year or so but sadly (nah, perfectly fairly) Google got wise to it.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#298Whenever I see mention of stack overflow’s decline I think of “StackOverflow does not want to help you”
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#299I 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…
I too, around 2012 was too much active on so, in fact, it had that counter thing continuously xyz days most of my one liners, or snippets for php are still the highest voted answers. Even now when sometimes I google something, and an answer comes up, I realize its me who asked the same question and answered it too.
I have had this experience -- twice with the same answer. There is nothing so amusing in quite this way.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#300Some 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…
I don't think "good moderation or not" really touches what was happening with SO.
I joined SO early and it had a "gamified" interface that I actually found fun. Putting in effort and such I able to slowly gain karma.
The problem was as the site scaled, the competition to answer a given question became more and more intense and that made it miserable. I left at that point but I think a lot people stayed with dynamic that was extremely unhealthy. (and the quality of accepted questions declined also).
With all this, the moderation criteria didn't have to directly change, it just had to fail to deal with the effects that were happening.