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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

#541

Post by zahlman »

specproc wrote: post #145
etamponi wrote: post #49

I spent the last 14 days chasing an issue with a Spark transform. Gemini and Claude were exceptionally good at giving me answers that looked perfectly reasonable: none of them worked, they were almost always completely off-road. Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc in the Spark (…

What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters. LLMs give one answer, or bullet points around a theme, or just dump a load of code in your IDE. SO gives a debate, in which the finer points of an issue are thrashed out, with the best answers (by and large) floating to the top. SO, at its best, is numerous highly-experienced and intelligent humans trying to demonstrate how clever they are. A bit l…

> What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters.

Stack Overflow is explicitly not for "dialogue", recent experiments (which are generally not well received by the regulars on the meta site) notwithstanding. The purpose of the comments on questions is to help refine the question and ensure it meets standards, and in some cases serve other meta purposes like pointing at different-but-related questions to help future readers find what they're looking for. Comments are generally subject to deletion at any time and were originally designed to be visually minimal. They are not part of the core experience.

Of course, the new ownership is undoing all of that, because of engagement metrics and such.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#542

Post by lbj »

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…

Really great write-up, thanks for sharing it again!

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#543

Post by rerdavies »

DrewADesign wrote: post #390
marcosdumay wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you had used the search feature you’d realize that many similar comments have already been posted on HN. Vote to close.

If only those who voted to close would bother to check whether the dup/close issue was ACTUALLY a duplicate. If only there were (substantial) penalties for incorrectly dup/closing. The vast majority of dup/closes seem to not actually be dup/closes. I really wish they would get rid of that feature. Would also prevent code rot (references to ancient versions of the software or compiler you're interested in that are no longer relevant, or solutions that have much easier fixes in modern versions of the software). Not missing StackOverflow in the least. It did not age well. (And the whole copyright thing was just toxically stupid).

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#544

Post by zahlman »

Someone1234 wrote: post #11

They will no doubt blame this on AI, somehow (ChatGPT release: late 2022, decline start: mid 2020), instead of the toxicity of the community and the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design. PS - This comment is closed as a [duplicate] of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482620

> the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design.

A Q&A site is a knowledge base. That's just how the information is presented.

If you want a forum — a place where you ask the question to get answered one-on-one — you have countless options for that.

Stack Overflow pages have a different design from that explicitly to encourage building a knowledge base. That's why there's a question at the top and answers underneath it, and why there are not follow-up questions, "me too" posts, discussion of annoyances related to the question, tangential rants, generic socialization etc.

Jeff Atwood was quite clear about this from the beginning.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#545

Post by zahlman »

nospice wrote: post #35
Someone1234 wrote: post #11

They will no doubt blame this on AI, somehow (ChatGPT release: late 2022, decline start: mid 2020), instead of the toxicity of the community and the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design. PS - This comment is closed as a [duplicate] of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482620

Right. I often end up on Stack Exchange when researching various engineering-related topics, and I'm always blown away by how incredibly toxic the threads are. We get small glimpses of that on HN, but it was absolutely out of control on Stack Exchange. At the same time, I think there was another factor: at some point, the corpus of answered questions has grown to a point where you no longer needed to ask, because by…

> I'm always blown away by how incredibly toxic the threads are.

They are not "threads" and are not supposed to be "threads". Thinking about them as if they were, is what leads to the perception of toxicity.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#546

Post by nerusskyhigh »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #296
erikig wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My genuine impression is that communities moved from forums to discord. Maybe that's why they are harder to find

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#547

Post by zahlman »

rorylawless wrote: post #176
Someone1234 wrote: post #11

They will no doubt blame this on AI, somehow (ChatGPT release: late 2022, decline start: mid 2020), instead of the toxicity of the community and the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design. PS - This comment is closed as a [duplicate] of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482620

The downward trend seems to start ~2017, and was interrupted by a spike during the early months of COVID-19. I'd be interested to know what drove that jump, perhaps people were less hesitant to post when they were working from home?

A huge amount of people were just starting to learn programming, because they were stuck at home and had the time to pick something up.

If you look at the trends tag by tag, you can see that the languages, libraries, technologies etc. that appeal to beginners and recreational coders grew disproportionately.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#548

Post by skvark »

tempest_ wrote: post #375
sky2224 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think most relevant data that provides best answers lives in GitHub. Sometimes in code, sometimes in issues or discussions. Many libs have their docs there as well. But the information is scattered and not easy to find, and often you need multiple sources to come up with a solution to some problem.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#549

Post by sixhobbits »

As everyone is saying, it was already down-trending before AI, and probably experts exchange traffic and whatever came before looks similar

Also not sure exactly when they added the huge popup[0] that covers the answer (maybe only in Europe as it's about cookies?) but that's definitely one of the things that made me default reach for other links instead of SO.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/Z7hxflF.png

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#550

Post by nromiun »

curvaturearth wrote: post #415

Where will LLMs be trained if no-one generates new posts and information like this? Do we sort of just stop innovating here in 2026? Probably not but it's a serious consideration.

Why do you think people stop creating new posts just because SO collapsed? People on GitHub issues and Reddit answer programming questions everyday.

SO was dying even before ChatGPT was released. LLMs just accelerated that process.

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