It's funny to see people's new year's resolution to learn how to code in the graph
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
581–590 of 1001 posts
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ques…
Heh, OK, dialogue wasn't the right word. I am a better informed person by the power of internet pedantry.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#583Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably. Why wouldn't the faded ox publish in a paper? Idk, but I guess we need things similar to those circulars that British royal society members used to send to each other...except not reserved for a club. The web should be a natural at this. But it's either centralized -> monetized -> corrupted, or decentr…
I wonder if there could be something like a Wikipedia for programming. A bit like what the book Design Patterns did in 1994, collecting everyone's useful solutions, but on a much larger scale. Everyone shares the best strategies and algorithms for everything, and updates them when new ones come about, and we finally stop reinventing the wheel for every new project. To some extent that was Stack Overflow, and it's als…
An algolwiki is a great idea, but I just wanted to say I got a good chuckle from this, thanks :)
> May I suggest "PASTE": Patterns, Algorithms, Solutions, Techniques, and Examples. "Just copy PASTE", they'll say.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#584As 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
Those popups were a big contributor for me to stop using SO. I stopped updating my uBlock origin rules when LLMs became good enough. I am now using the free Kimi K2 model via Groq over CLI, which is much faster.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#585Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
And discord is a terrible tool for knowledge collection imo. Their search is ok, but then I find myself digging through long and disjointed message threads, if replies/threading are even used at all by the participants.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#586Earlier quoted context omitted.
Show me one that was closed by a moderator. Just one. And I will tell you exactly what happened.
I think the poster you're responding to is correct. I've seen it many times myself. And just so you know, asking for a piece of data and not getting it is not going to be proof that you're right.
No, but it will show, as someone else already responded, that they don't understand SO systems and processes at all. The question they linked [0] was closed by the asker themselves. It's literally one of the comments [1] on the question. Most questions aren't even closed by moderators, not even by user voting, but by the askers themselves [2], which can be seen on the table as community user. The community user gets attributed of all automated actions and whenever the user agrees with closure of their own question [3]. (The same user also gets attributed of bunch of other stuff [4]
This shows that critics of Stack Overflow don't understand how Stack Overflow works and start assigning things that SO users see normal and expected to some kind of malice or cabal. Now, if you learned how it works, and how long it has been working this way, you will see that cases of abuses are not only rare, they usually get resolved once they are known.
[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32711321/setting-element...
[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32711321/setting-element...
[2]: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/432658/2024-a-year-...
[3]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/250922/can-we-clari...
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#587Derivative of S curve
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#588Why did SO traffic halve from it's maximum till the ChatGPT release date? Also, for a long time after initial release, ChatGPT was pretty much useless for coding questions. It only became more or less useful ~2 years ago. So there's about 4x decline from peak to explain with reasons that do not involve LLMs. What these could be?
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#589Earlier quoted context omitted.
I asked a question for the first time mid last year. It was a question about "default" sizes in HTML layout calculations, with lots of research and links to relevant parts of the spec. It was immediately closed as off topic, and there were a bunch of extremely vitriolic comments offended that I'd ask such a question on SO. It was briefly reopened weeks (?) later and then I guess closed again and now is deleted, so yo…
Questions are never really deleted , post a link so people with enough reputation may have a look and maybe resurrect it if the question is really good.
Why would anyone with an ounce of self-respect try to beg an stranger with enough internet point to look if their question is worthy of being asked? Do you not realize how the proposal must sound to someone who is not already in the SO in-group?
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
Not sure why you are always posting the same regurgitated answer to the legitimate concerns here.
There is clearly a big issue with the way SO handles moderation, which many people complain about and why these SO threads always get so much attention.
Also its now very clear that the current status quo isnt working since the site is in a death spiral now.
If the “goal” doesnt work, you have to change and fix the “goal” and not force people to “understand” it.
Frankly you are posting here in the same way the usual SO mod acts.
I was also once a contributor, but I have the same opinions about the harsh rules and points system.