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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

#371

Post by rileymat2 »

gfody wrote: post #330
cornel_io wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking questions on SO was an exercise in frustration, not "interacting with peers". I've never once had a productive interaction there, everything I've ever asked was either closed for dumb reasons or not answered at all. The library of past answers was more useful, but fell off hard for more recent tech, I assume because people all were having the same frustrations as I was and just stopped going there to ask anyth…

this right here, not just overmoderated but the mods were wrong-headed from the start believing that it was more important to protect some sacred archive than for users to have good experiences. SO was so elite it basically committed suicide rather than let the influx of noobs and their noob questions and noob answers kill the site this nails it: https://www.tiktok.com/@techroastshow/video/7518116912623045...

It's funny, because I had a similar question but wanted to be able to materialize a view in Microsoft SQL Server, and ChatGPT went around in circles suggesting invalid solutions.

There were about 4 possibilities that I had tried before going to ChatGPT, it went through all 4, then when the fourth one failed it gave me the first one again.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#372

Post by saltymimir »

The obvious culprit here are the LLMs, but I do wonder whether Github's social features, despite its flaws, have given developers fewer reasons to ask questions on SO?

Speaking from experience, every time I hit a wall with my projects, I would instinctively visit the project's repo first, and check on the issues / discussions page. More often than not, I was able to find someone with an adjacent problem and get close enough to a solution just by looking at the resolution. If it all failed, I would fall back to asking questions on the discussion forum first before even considering to visit SO.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#373

Post by k1w1 »

I am surprised at the amount of hate for Stack Overflow here. As a developer I can't think of a single website that has helped me as much over the last ten years.

It has had a huge benefit for the development community, and I for one will mourn its loss.

I do wonder where answers will come from in the future. As others have noted in this thread, documentation is often missing, or incorrect. SO collected the experiences of actual users solving real problems. Will AI share experiences in a similar way? In principle it could, and in practice I think it will need to. The shared knowledge of SO made all developers more productive. In an AI coded future there will need to be a way for new knowledge to be shared.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#374

Post by casey2 »

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?

How is it much different than trading say a bar for livestream? For any org if you can remove the human meatware you should otherwise you are just making a bunch of busywork to exlude people from using your service.

Just through the act of existing meatware prevents other humans from joining. The reasons may be shallow or well thought out. 95+% of answers on stack overflow are written by men so for most women stack overflow is already a hellscape.

If companies did more work on bias (or at least not be so offensive to various identities) that benefit, of distributing knowledge/advice/RTFM, could be even greater.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#375

Post by tempest_ »

sky2224 wrote: post #344
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 Devel…

This type of thing often lives in the issues / discussion tab of a github repo now a days, for better and worse.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#376

Post by emodendroket »

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…

If we're going to diagnose pre-AI Stack Overflow problems I see two obvious ones:

1. The attempt to cut back on the harshness of moderation meant letting through more low-quality questions.

2. More importantly, a lot of the content is just stale. Like you go to some question and the accepted answer with the most votes is for a ten-year-old version of the technology.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#377

Post by vivzkestrel »

porcoda wrote: post #13

Not a big surprise once LLMs came along: stack overflow developed some pretty unpleasant traits over time. Everything from legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers. For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.

not only stackoverflow, but also reddit.com/r/aws reddit.com/r/docker reddit.com/r/postgresql all 3 of them have extremely toxic communities. ask a question and get downvoted instantly! Noo!! your job is to actually upvote the question to maximize exposure for the algorithm unless it is a really really stupid question that a google search could fix

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#379

Post by emodendroket »

nerdponx wrote: post #190
Alupis wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is. The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. Meanwhile, "how do I concat a string" gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes. The incentive/reward structure punished experienced folks with chal…

That might be true on Stackoverflow but not on other network sites like Cross Validated, which was killed by splitting the community into multiple SE sites and longtime users quitting in protest over various policies and not being replaced.

I think there's a basic problem that the original revenue model for the site just didn't work (I mean, they wouldn't have shut down Stack Overflow Jobs if that actually made them any money) and anything they were able to do to fix that pissed people off.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#380

Post by CamperBob2 »

josephg wrote: post #305
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 I read an interview once with one of the founders of SO. They said the main value stackoverflow provided wasn't to the person who asked the question. It was for the person who googled it later and found the answer. This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. They were pr…

Sad? No. A good LLM is vastly better than SO ever was. An LLM won't close your question for being off-topic in the opinion of some people but not others. It won't flame you for failing to phrase your question optimally, or argue about exactly which site it should have been posted on. It won't "close as duplicate" because a vaguely-similar question was asked 10 years ago in a completely-different context (and never really got a great answer back then).

Moreover, the LLM has access to all instances of similar problems, while a human can only read one SO page at a time.

The question of what will replace SO in future models, though, is a valid one. People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. So many site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously trying to attract Google's.

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