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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

#341

Post by shevy-java »

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…

> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question

But the horrible moderation was in part a reason why many SO questions had no answers.

I am not saying poor moderation caused all of this, but it contributed negatively and many people were pissed at that and stopped using SO. It is not the only reason SO declined, but there are many reasons for SO failure after its peak days.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#342

Post by _alternator_ »

esafak wrote: post #67
hdgvhicv wrote: post #48

Earlier 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.

Yup. Like Claude 3 Opus.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#343

Post by dotancohen »

lysace wrote: post #222
econ wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's remarkable only in the sense that you can see where the LLMs were trained from.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#344

Post by sky2224 »

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…

This is a perfect example of an element of Q&A forums that is being lost. Another thing that I don't think we'll see as much of anymore is interaction from developers that have extensive internal knowledge on products.

An example I can think of was when Eric Lippert, a developer on the C# compiler at the time, responded to a question about a "gotcha" in the language: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8899347/10470363

Developer interaction like that is going to be completely lost.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#345

Post by pvab3 »

lysace wrote: post #222
econ wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That would be such a useful service today

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#346

Post by paulryanrogers »

Surprising to see it bottom out so hard.

I imagine at least some of the leveling off could be due to question saturation. If duplicates are culled (earnestly or overzealously) then there will be a point where most of the low hanging fruit is picked.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#347

Post by marcosdumay »

paulgerhardt wrote: post #323
jvanderbot wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can write a paper, submit the arxiv, and you can also make a blog post. At any rate, I agree - SO was (is?) a wonderful place for this kind of thing. I once had a professor mention that they knew me from SO because I posted a few underhanded tricks to prevent an EKF from "going singular" in production. That kind of community is going to be hard to replace, but SO isnt going anywhere, you can still ask a question…

I would imagine the endorsement requirement reduces submissions by a few orders of magnitude.

At this point SO seems harder to publish into than arxiv.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#348

Post by ambicapter »

stackghost wrote: post #282
llbeansandrice wrote: post #258

Earlier 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.

The part where you don't talk to anyone else, just a robot intermediary which is simulating the way humans talk, is part of UX. Sounds like pretty horrifying UX.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#349

Post by 20after4 »

xp84 wrote: post #297
wood_spirit wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm actually surprised it was only ~$20 a month.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#350

Post by GaryBluto »

ianbutler wrote: post #179
danver0 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

I'm not sure he intended it as an insult. Despite not using LLMs for HTML or JavaScript often (if at all), I was under the impression that it was one of their strong areas.
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