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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

#551

Post by knallfrosch »

sedatk wrote: post #518

SO has lost against LLMs because it has insistently positioned itself as a knowledge base rather than a community. The harsh moderation, strict content policing, forbidden socialization, lack of follow mechanics etc have all collectively contributed to it. They basically made a bet because they wanted to be the full anti-thesis of ad-ridden garbage-looking forums. Pure information, zero tolerance for humanity, steril…

IMO people underestimate the value of heavy moderation. But moderation heavy or light, good or bad.

Why wait hours for an answer when an LLM gives it in seconds?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#552

Post by zahlman »

Alex2037 wrote: post #265
gfhifd42 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

They're trying really hard now. Constant attempts to introduce half-baked AI features that the meta community doesn't want. Posts from staff (i.e., actual employees of Stack Exchange, Inc.; not the unpaid moderators) on the meta site rarely if ever get a positive score in the last few years.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#553

Post by mr_toad »

weatherlite wrote: post #497

This is incredible. Anyone who claims LLMs aren't useful will need to explain how come almost every programmer can solve 95% of his problems with an LLM without needing anything else. This is real usefulness right here. EDIT: I'm not saying I'm loving what happened and what is becoming of our roles and careers, I'm just saying things have changed forever; there's still a (shrinking) minority of people who seem to not…

Maybe we had too many programmers who weren’t capable of actually solving their own problems. Maybe only one in twenty programmers were ever actually any good at their jobs.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#554

Post by zahlman »

RomanPushkin wrote: post #23

Many users left because they had had overly strict moderation for posting your questions. I have 6k reputation, multiple gold badges and I will remember StackOverflow as a hostile place to ask a questions, honestly. There were multiple occasions when they actually prevented me from asking, and it was hard to understand what exactly went wrong. To my understanding, I asked totally legit questions, but their asking pol…

> To my understanding, I asked totally legit questions, but their asking policy is so strict, it's super hard to follow.

I think https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 is pretty straightforward. If you can show a question of yours that was closed, I'll be happy to try to explain why.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#555

Post by phoenixy1 »

zero_shift wrote: post #161
Salgat wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seemed like for every other question, I received unsolicited advice telling me how I shouldn't be doing it this way, only for me to have to explain why I wanted to do it this way (with silence from them).

Oh I love that game! (At least I think it's a game) You ask how to do X. Member M asks why you want to do X. Because you want to do Y. Well!? why do you want to do Y?? Because Y is on T and you can't do K so you need a Z Well! Well! Why do you even use Z?? Clearly J is the way it is now recommended! Because Z doesn't work on a FIPS environment. ... Can you help me? ... I just spent 15 minutes explaining X, Y and Z. D…

My heuristic is that if your interlocutor asks follow-up questions like that with no indication of why (like “why do you want to do X?” rather than “why do you want to do X? If the answer is Y, then X is a bad approach because Q, you should try Z instead”) then they are never going to give you a helpful answer.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#556

Post by zahlman »

g947o wrote: post #142
RomanPushkin wrote: post #23

Many users left because they had had overly strict moderation for posting your questions. I have 6k reputation, multiple gold badges and I will remember StackOverflow as a hostile place to ask a questions, honestly. There were multiple occasions when they actually prevented me from asking, and it was hard to understand what exactly went wrong. To my understanding, I asked totally legit questions, but their asking pol…

I have around 2k points, not something to brag about, but probably more than most stackoverflow users. And I know what I am talking about given over a decade of experience in various tech stacks. But it requires 3,000 points to be able to cast a vote to reopen a question, many of which incorrectly marked as duplicate. I said to myself, let it die.

> many of which incorrectly marked as duplicate.

Please feel free to cite examples. I'll be happy to explain why I think they're duplicates, assuming I do (in my experience, well over 90% of the time I see this complaint, it's quite clear to me that the question is in fact a duplicate).

But more importantly, use the meta site if you think something has been done poorly. It's there for a reason.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#557

Post by zahlman »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #245
RomanPushkin wrote: post #23

Many users left because they had had overly strict moderation for posting your questions. I have 6k reputation, multiple gold badges and I will remember StackOverflow as a hostile place to ask a questions, honestly. There were multiple occasions when they actually prevented me from asking, and it was hard to understand what exactly went wrong. To my understanding, I asked totally legit questions, but their asking pol…

25k here, stopped posting cause you'd spend 10m on a reply to a question just to have the question closed on you by some mod trying to make everything neat. Maybe it was a culture clash but I came from newsgroups where the issue was is that someone needed help. However SO had the idea that the person who needed help wasn't as important as the normalisation of the dataset. I sometimes wonder how much time I could have…

> Maybe it was a culture clash but I came from newsgroups where the issue was is that someone needed help. However SO had the idea that the person who needed help wasn't as important as the normalisation of the dataset.

Yes, because doing things that way was explicitly part of the goal, from the beginning. There are countless other places where you can directly respond to people who need help (and if you like doing that, you should stick to those places). Doing things that way has negative consequences in terms of making something that's useful for on-lookers, and causing a lot of experts to burn out or get frustrated. This is stuff that Jeff Atwood was pointing out when explaining the reason for creating SO in the first place.

> I sometimes wonder how much time I could have saved for those whose questions got closed before I could answer them.

It would be better to focus on saving time for yourself, by understanding the goal. Please read https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/254770 and https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/429808 .

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#558

Post by gyan »

zahlman wrote: post #539
gyan wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are positing that only questions with cosmetic or extraneous differences are marked as duplicates. That's not the case. As a maintainer of a popular project who has engaged with thousands of Qs on SO related to that project, I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer would be different in a non-trivial manner. When I look at who all moderated on those Qs, they are usually users who haven't cont…

> That's not the case. Yes, it is. I have been active on both the main and meta sites for many years. I have seen so many of these complaints and they overwhelmingly boil down to that. And I have gotten so unbelievably stressed out on so many occasions trying to explain to people why their trivial objections are missing the point of the site completely. > I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer…

> Please feel free to cite specific examples. I'll be happy to explain policy.

How do I search for Qs closed as duplicates with a certain tag?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#560

Post by knallfrosch »

parpfish wrote: post #252

Here’s how SO could still be useful in the LLM era: User asks a question, llm provides an immediate answer/reply on the forum. But real people can still jump in to the conversation to add additional insights and correct mistakes. If you’re a user that asks a duplicate question, it’ll just direct you to the good conversation that already happened. A symbiosis of immediate usually-good-enough llm answers PLUS human gen…

Users could upvote whether Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT provided the best answer. The best of three is surfaced, the others are hidden behind a "show alternatives."

However, I can see how this would be labelled "shoving AI into everything" and "I'm not on SO for AI."

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