Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

data.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

601–610 of 1001 posts

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#601

Post by ijidak »

nprateem wrote: post #395
NewJazz wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental difference between asking on SO and asking an LLM is that SO is a public forum, and an LLM will be communicated with in private. This has a lot of implications, most of which surround the ability for people to review and correct bad information.

Surely the fundamental difference is one asks actual humans who know what's right vs statistical models that are right by accident.

Providing context to ask a Stack Overflow question was time-consuming.

In the time it takes to properly format and ask a question on Stack Overflow, an engineer can iterate through multiple bad LLM responses and eventually get to the right one.

The stats tell the uncomfortable truth. LLMs are a better overall experience than Stack Overflow, even after accounting for inaccurate answers from the LLM.

Don't forget, human answers on Stack Overflow were also often wrong or delayed by hours or days.

I think we're romanticizing the quality of the average human response on Stack Overflow.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#602

Post by braiamp »

marcosdumay wrote: post #366
braiamp wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most? 3 out of 15 is most? What's wrong with youngsters today?!

Right now, at the first 15 one has a positive vote, 6 have negative votes, going down to -3. The 8 at 0 are just taking longer to amass those negative votes. It's incredibly rare that a positive one ever goes somewhere.

So, I reviewed the questions list again but this time, since the time I did view it about 9 hours ago [1]. 10 were negative scored, 5 positive scored, 15 0 scored, 4 has received answers. This is better than normal for those ~30. Usually it's 80% without votes, without answers, without comments. So, this is a significan improvement... which I suspect is due the time of the day, as the US and most of Europe were asleep.

So, yeah, actually this looks promising and a movement in the positive direction.

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions?tab=Newest

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#603

Post by qcnguy »

zahlman wrote: post #508
m463 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your first example is a public announcement of an llm assisted ask question form. A detailed request for feedback on an experiment isn't "sneaking" and the replies are a tire fire of stupidity. One of your top complaints about users in this thread is they ask the wrong sort of questions so AI review seems like it should be useful.

The top voted answer asks why SO is even trying to improve anything when there's a moderator strike on. What is this, the 1930s? It's a voluntary role, if you don't like it just don't do it.

The second top voted answer says "I was able to do a prompt injection and make it write me sql with an injection bug". So? It also complains that the llm might fix people's bad English, meaning they ask the wrong question, lol.

It seems clear these people started from a belief that ai is always bad, and worked backwards to invent reasons why this specific feature is bad.

It's crazy that you are defending this group all over this HN thread, telling people that toxicity isn't a problem. I've not seen such a bitchy passive aggressive thread in years. Those replies are embarrassing for the SO community, not AI.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#604

Post by mixmastamyk »

Shog9 wrote: post #456
Aurornis wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 moderation from the beginning. I was an early SO user and I don’t agree with this. The moderation was always there, but from my perspective it wasn’t until the site really pushed into branching out and expanding Stack Exchange across many topics to become a Quora style competitor…

There was definitely a bit of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [0] at work. I worked there during a lot of the drama you allude to, and... It sucked, for everyone. But also... For most of SO's history, the vast majority of visitors (and this questions, answers) came in via Google. Not "search engines"; Google. This was pretty much baked in right at the start, and it effectively served as the site's primary user in…

Best answer so far, too bad way down here.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#605

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

Nition wrote: post #525
keepamovin wrote: post #408

Earlier 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…

> To some extent that was Stack Overflow

Yup, that was always very much the plan, from the earliest days. Shame it soured a bit, but since the content is all freely reusable, maybe something can be built atop the ashes?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#606

Post by DrSiemer »

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…

We'll get to the point where we can mass moderate core knowledge eventually. We may need to hand out extra weight for verified experts and some kind of most-votes-win type logic (perhaps even comments?), but live training data updates will be a massive evolution for language models.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#607

Post by tonyhart7 »

I not even hearing stack overflow survey for 2025

damn bro, its sad how "tradition" is gone now

edit: I know they still doing it but usually there is "viral" post,yt video etc for developer talking about it in my feed

now??? less people talk about it anymore

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#608

Post by mixmastamyk »

dahart wrote: post #401
josephg wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question I read an interview once with one of the founders of SO. They said the main value stackoverflow provided wasn't to the person who asked the question. It was for the person who googled it later and found the answer. This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. They were pr…

> This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. My personal single biggest source of frustration with SO has been outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time. It feels like SO started solidifying and failed to do the moderation cleaning and…

They introduced recent-votes-count-more, perhaps five years ago.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#609

Post by bambax »

Nition wrote: post #525
keepamovin wrote: post #408

Earlier 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…

Yes exactly! It would need some publicity of some kind to get started but it's the best solution, certainly? And all of the tools and infrastructure already exist.
Post reply on HN