Couldn’t have happened to a meaner community
You're clearly excluding gaming communities such as DotA2.
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
561–570 of 1001 posts
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#562On what will the LLMs train, now?
On the same 14 year old Java questions like the rest of us.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems you deny each problem that everyone sees in SO. The fact is SO repulsed people, so there is a gap between your interpretation and reality. > It is as though people think they are being insulted when they are immediately given a link to where they can get the necessary answer, by volunteers. This, for example. Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer. In this case yes, it feels insulting because…
> Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer. No, they literally cannot. The only valid targets for closure are existing questions that have an upvoted or accepted answer. The system will not permit the closure (or vote to close) otherwise. If you mean "without writing a direct answer to the new question first", that is the exact point of the system . Literally all you have to do is click the link and read…
I’m sure I’ve had the experience of being told it’s a duplicate, without resolving my problem.
In any case, you may be right, and yet if you search this thread for “horrible” and “obnoxious”, you’ll find dozens of occurrence. Maybe defining the rules of engagement so that the user is wrong every time doesn’t work.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
That was not closed by a moderator. In fact, it was closed automatically by the system, when you agreed that the question was a duplicate. Because of my privilege level I can see that information in the close dialog:
> A community member has associated this post with a similar question. If you believe that the duplicate closure is incorrect, submit an edit to the question to clarify the difference and recommend the question be reopened.
> Closed 10 years ago by paradite, CommunityBot.
> (List of close voters is only viewable by users with the close/reopen votes privilege)
... Actually, your reputation should be sufficient to show you that, too.
Anyway, it seems to me that the linked duplicate does answer the question. You asked why the unit-less value "stopped working", which presumably means that it was interpreted by newer browsers as having a different unit from what you intended; the linked duplicate is asking for the rules that determine the implicit unit when none is specified.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
StackOverflow is famously obnoxious about questions badly asked, badly categorized, duplicated… It’s actually a topic on which StackOverflow would benefit from AI A LOT. Imagine StackOverflow rebrands itself as the place where you can ask the LLM and it benefits the world, whoch correctly rephrasing the question behind the scenes and creating public records for them.
And famously obnoxious about rejecting questions that are properly asked, properly categorized, and not actually duplicated.
SO is not obnoxious because the users are wrong!
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
I logged into my old account and found an old question I asked: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32711321/setting-element...
The linked answer seems like a valid guess for a relevant dupe. Like I said in my comment, "I understand a few eggs got cracked along the way to making this omelette" but I really don't think this was as widespread of a problem as people are making it out to be. They also have Meta Stack Overflow to appeal if you think your question was unfairly marked as a dupe. From what I read, it seems that most mods back off rea…
> From what I read, it seems that most mods back off readily
If a reasonable, policy-aware argument is presented, yes. In my experience, though, the large majority of requests are based in irrelevant differences, and OP often comes across and fundamentally opposed to the idea of marking duplicates at all.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#567I ended up having a high reputation on SO. Not sure why, but it’s over 7000. I also experienced many of the issues I see described here. The most egregious was when I asked a completely valid question for R: How to fit a curve through a set of points, with each point having an error associated. This is something completely normal in a physics experiment. Each measurement had its own error interval. But, for people us…
This entire thread is fantastic. I felt nostalgic, angry and then concerned all at once.
I love LLMs. But I miss SO. I miss being able to have that community. How do we bring it back?
If anyone from the Stack Overflow team is reading this (I assume you are): what’s the plan?
My take: stop optimizing for raw question volume and start optimizing for producing and maintaining “known good” public knowledge. The thing SO still has that Discord and LLMs don’t is durable, linkable, reviewable answers with accountable humans behind them. But the workflow needs to match how devs work now.
A concrete idea: make “asking” a guided flow that’s more like opening a good GitHub issue. Let me paste my error output, environment, minimal repro, what I tried, and what I think is happening. Then use tooling (including an LLM if you want) to pre check duplicates, suggest missing details, and auto format. Crucially: don’t punish me for being imperfect. Route borderline questions into a sandbox or draft mode where they can be improved instead of just slammed shut.
Second idea: invest hard in keeping answers current. A ton of SO is correct but stale. Add obvious “this is old” signaling and make it rewarding to post updates, not just brand new answers.
Last thing that I don’t see an easy answer to: LLMs are feasting on old SO content today. But LLMs still need fresh, high quality, real world edge cases tomorrow. They need the complexity and problem solving that humans provide. A lot of the answers I get are recycled. No net new thinking. If fewer people ask publicly, where does that new ground truth come from? What’s the mechanism that keeps the commons replenished?
So… TLDR…my question to this group of incredibly intelligent people: how does SO save itself?
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
Show me one that was closed by a moderator. Just one. And I will tell you exactly what happened.
You had me looking through my history. Here is an example from 12 years ago: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15626760/does-an-idle-my... Granted when I look at that question today, it doesn't make much sense. But 12 years-back me didn't know much better. Let's just say the community was quite hostile to people trying to figure stuff out and learn.
> Let's just say the community was quite hostile to people trying to figure stuff out and learn.
I don't understand how there is supposedly any hostility on display there.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#569Some 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 suspect that the gradual decline, beginning around 2016, is due to growth in a number of other sources of answers."
I think at least one other reason is that a lot of the questions were already posted. There are only so many questions of interest, until a popular new technology comes along. And if you look at mathoverflow (which wouldnt have the constant shocks from new technologies) the trend is pretty stable...until right around 2022. And even since then, the dropoff isn't nearly so dramatic. https://data.stackexchange.com/mathoverflow/query/edit/19272...
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#570So the question for me is how important was SO to training LLMs? Because now that the SO is basically no longer being updated, we've lost the new material to train on? Instead, we need to train on documentation and other LLM output. I'm no expert on this subject but it seems like the quality of LLMs will degrade over time.