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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

#501

Post by digitalPhonix »

braiamp wrote: post #277
garganzol wrote: post #186

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.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79530539/how-is-an-ssh-c...

Question: How is an SSH certificate added using the SSH agent protocol?

> Closed. This question is seeking recommendations for software libraries, tutorials, tools, books, or other off-site resources

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#502

Post by lofaszvanitt »

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…

Google also played a part. After a while, I noticed that for my programming related questions, almost no SO discussions showed up. When they did appear on the first page, they were usually abysmal and unusable for me.

When it started all kinds of very clever people were present and helped even with very deep and complex questions and problems. A few years later these people disappeared. The moderation was ok in the beginning, then they started wooing away a lot of talented people. And then the mods started acting like nazis, killing discussions, proper questions on a whim.

And then bots (?) or karma obsessed/farming people started to upvote batshit crazy, ridiculous answers, while the proper solution had like 5 upvotes and no green marker next to it.

It was already a cesspool before AI took over and they sold all their data. Initial purpose achieved.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#503

Post by gyomu »

braiamp wrote: post #269

Actual analysts here that have looked at this graph like... a lot, so let me contextualize certain themes that tend to crop up from these: - The reduction of questions over time is asymptomatic of SO. When you have a library of every question asked, at some point, you asked most of the easy questions. Have a novel question becomes hard. - This graph is using the Posts table, not PostsWithDeleted. So, it only tells yo…

> When you have a library of every question asked, at some point, you asked most of the easy questions. Have a novel question becomes hard

This would be true if programming were a static field, but given that new programming languages/frameworks/technologies/techniques/etc. are constantly coming out and evolving, that argument doesn't make sense.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#504

Post by zarzavat »

zahlman wrote: post #475
lurk2 wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate; and then everyone else with the same problem can search, possibly find the new…

Yes but that only works if the questions are identical. Often however they are merely similar, but closed as duplicates nonetheless.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#505

Post by weatherlite »

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…

> What do LLMs train off of now? I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? Or will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions?

That's a great question. I have no idea how things will play out now - do models become generalized enough to handle "out of distrubition" problems or not ? If they don't then I suppose a few years from now we'll get an uptick in Stackoverflow questions; the website will still exist it's not going anywhere.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#506

Post by timeon »

Alupis wrote: post #107
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.

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…

> the more experienced you become, the less useful it is

This is killer feature of LLMs - you will not became more experienced.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#507

Post by zahlman »

zarzavat wrote: post #504
zahlman wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Yes; so the idea is they fail to find the existing question, and ask it again, and get marked as a duplicate; and then everyone else with the same problem can search, possibly find the new…

Yes but that only works if the questions are identical . Often however they are merely similar, but closed as duplicates nonetheless.

No, that is completely wrong. It is exactly because the questions are not identical that the system works. That is what allows for multiple versions of a popular, important question to catch attention from search engines, and send everyone to the same, correct place.

Perhaps your objection is that, because the target question is not literally identical (for example, maybe a code sample has different variable names, or the setup has an irrelevant difference in the container type used for a collection, etc.) that the answers don't literally answer the new version of the question. That is completely missing the point. It's not a forum. The Q&A format is just the way that information is being presented. Fixing the issue in your, personal code is not, and never has been, the goal.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#508

Post by zahlman »

m463 wrote: post #288
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…

The meta post describing the policy of banning AI-generated answers from the site (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/421831) is the most popular of all time. Company interference with moderator attempts to enforce that policy lead to a moderator strike. The community is vehemently against the company's current repeated attempts to sneak AI into the system, which have repeatedly produced embarrassing results (see for example https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425081 and https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162 ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/427807 ; https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425766 etc.).

What you propose is a complete non-starter.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#509

Post by zahlman »

joe_the_user wrote: post #300
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…

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 t…

Agreed. The reputation system was extremely ill considered and never revisited. You may be interested in https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387356 .
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