Live data from Hacker News

Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

data.stackexchange.com

421–430 of 1001 posts

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better But LLMs get their answers from StackOverflow and similar places being used as the source material. As those start getting outdated because of lack of activity, LLMs won't have the source material to answer questions properly.

Now they can read the documentation and code in the repo directly and answer based on that.

SO had answers that you couldn't find in the documentation and were you can't look in the source code.

If everything would be well documentated SO wouldn't have being as big as it was in the first place.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#422
SO has been a curse on technology. I've met teams of people who decide whether to adopt some technology based solely on if they can find SO answers for it. They refuse to read documentation or learn how the technology works; they'll only google for SO answers, and if the answer's not there, they give up. There's an entire generation like this now.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with duplicate questions is that they weren't duplicates at all, and mods weren't competent enough to tell a difference.

Show me one that was closed by a moderator. Just one. And I will tell you exactly what happened.

I logged into my old account and found an old question I asked:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32711321/setting-element...

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#425
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legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers.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.

Oh yeah. My favorite feature of LLMs, is the only dumb question, is the one I don't ask. I guess someone could train an LLM to be spiteful and nasty, but that would only be for entertainment.

If you say the wrong thing to grok, it will go off on you. It's quite entertaining!

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#426
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…

> This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer.

Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers. Prior to LLMs, my use case for StackOverflow was something like this:

30 minutes trying (and failing) to use the right search terms to articulate the problem (remember, there was no contextual understanding, so if you used a word with two meanings and one of those meanings was more popular, you’d have to omit it using the exclusion operator).

30 minutes reading through the threads I found (half of which will have been closed or answered by users who ignored some condition presented by the OP).

5 minutes on implementation.

2 minutes pounding my head on my desk because it shouldn’t have been that hard.

With an LLM, if the problem has been documented at any point in the last 20 years, I can probably solve it using my initial prompt even as a layman. When you’d actually find an answer on StackOverflow, it was often only because you finally found a different way of phrasing your search so that a relevant result came up. Half the time the OP would describe the exact problem you were having only for the thread to be closed by moderators as a duplicate of another question that lacked one of your conditions.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#428
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

For me, the value was writing answers on topics I was interested in…and internet points as feedback on their quality.

When SE abandoned their app, it broke my habit.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#429
post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Probably about https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/336526/stack-overfl... and the ensuing shitstorm

Nah. Farther back in time and psychologically deeper. Its in my, very short, comment history.

They told their community their motivation was to combat the selfish monetization of digital sharecroppers and then they monetized their digital sharecroppers.

They are frauds and eventually frauds are exposed and they exposed themselves for $1.8billion.

And SO it collapsed.

But thanks for speaking for me. Albeit incorrectly, ironically.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

For someone with a green username, you sure do have strong opinions about hn

I literally said I've been here longer than someone who has been here since 2013 so you attack my profile age.

This is the toxic destruction of hn I'm talking about.

You are the toxic one. You offer negative value.

Post reply on HN