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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

#611

Post by Boltgolt »

omneity wrote: post #231
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…

Thinking from first principles, a large part of the content on stack overflow comes from the practical experience and battle scars worn by developers sharing them with others and cross-curating approaches. Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc. It will be this shared interlocutor with vast swaths of experiential knowled…

I don't know how others use LLMs, but once I find the answer to something I'm stuck on I do not tell the LLM that it's fixed. This was a problem in forums as well but I think even fewer people are going to give that feedback to a chatbot

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#612

Post by austin-cheney »

throw-12-16 wrote: post #481
austin-cheney wrote: post #237

I used to contribute a ton to Stack Overflow at the beginning in 2009 and 2010 and then stopped cold turkey. One of the senior product execs emailed me to see what turned me off. What killed it for me was community moderation. People who cannot contribute with quality content will attempt to contribute by improperly and excessively applying their opinion of what is allowed. Unfortunately it happens to every online te…

HN is a sponsored marketing outlet for YC first and foremost.

HN has full time staff that provides moderation and does an excellent job. Nonetheless there are numerous users who take it upon themselves to determine what content should be available to the rest of us, as if they were heroes in their own mind.

It’s a form of narcissism. While they think of themselves as community saviors everyone else thinks they are censoring assholes. Just let the moderators do their job. Unwanted content will naturally fall off either by downvoting or it will be ignored.

All the rest of ask for is just don’t be an asshole.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#613

Post by [deleted] »

Cordiali wrote: post #527
xp84 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of one “accepted answer” there always bugged me. The correct/best answer of many things changes radically over time. For instance The only sane way to do a lot of things in “JavaScript” in 2009 was to install jquery and use it. Most of those same things can (and should) be done just as succinctly with native code today, but the accepted answers in practice were rarely updated or changed. I don’t even know if…

I noticed a similar thing for Python 3 questions, closed as a duplicate of a Python 2 response. Why they weren't collated and treated as a living document is beyond me.

[deleted]

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#614

Post by kwakubiney »

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…

Naive question maybe but how haven’t the models been trained on your answer if it’s on SO?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#615

Post by maplethorpe »

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…

> will we find new, better ways to find answers to technical questions?

I honestly don't think they need to. As we've seen so far, for most jobs in this world, answers that sound correct are good enough.

Is chasing more accuracy a good use of resources if your audience can't tell the difference anyway?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#616

Post by mixmastamyk »

gfody wrote: post #330
cornel_io wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking questions on SO was an exercise in frustration, not "interacting with peers". I've never once had a productive interaction there, everything I've ever asked was either closed for dumb reasons or not answered at all. The library of past answers was more useful, but fell off hard for more recent tech, I assume because people all were having the same frustrations as I was and just stopped going there to ask anyth…

this right here, not just overmoderated but the mods were wrong-headed from the start believing that it was more important to protect some sacred archive than for users to have good experiences. SO was so elite it basically committed suicide rather than let the influx of noobs and their noob questions and noob answers kill the site this nails it: https://www.tiktok.com/@techroastshow/video/7518116912623045...

Yahoo answers died a lot faster and heavily formed SO policy.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#617

Post by rplnt »

One factor I haven't seen mentioned is the catastrophic decline in quality of Google search. That started pre-llm and now the site is almost unusable to search web. You can access something you know exists and you know where it exists, but to actually search..?

Most SO users are passive readers who land there using search, but these readers are also the feed of new active users. Cut off the influx, and the existing ones will be in decline (the moderation just accelerates it).

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#618

Post by luckylion »

bmacho wrote: post #158
Alupis wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is. The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue are rewarded with a single upvote. Meanwhile, "how do I concat a string" gets dozens or hundreds of upvotes. The incentive/reward structure punished experienced folks with chal…

> People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is. This is literally not true. The rate you learn and encounter new things depends on many things: you, your mood, your energy etc. But not on the amount of your experience. > The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue a…

I think it is true, but not because you have nothing more to learn when you're experienced, but that there are fewer and fewer people on SO to answer the questions that you encounter when you get more and more experienced.

I've answered about 200 questions. I've asked two, and both remain unanswered to this day. One of them had comments from someone who clearly was out of their league but wanted to be helpful. The people who could've answered those questions are not (or were not at that time) on SO.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#619

Post by fragmede »

gfhifd42 wrote: post #464
fragmede wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well I've been around here longer than you Prove it. Use your main account, you coward.

I don't have anything to prove to you. You are the toxicity I'm talking about. You've added zero value to the discussion. I've offered value. You attack my account age and I've already said why it's not old. Because idgaf.

Integrity usually means owning your words. Pseudonymity can be fine, but pretending it signals higher principle is backwards.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#620

Post by ahmetomer »

For this occasion, I just logged in to my SO profile; I've been a member for 9 years now.

To me, back when I started out learning web dev, as a junior with no experience and barely knowing anything, SO seemed like a paradise for programmers. I could go on there and get unblocked for the complex (but trivial for experts) issues I was facing. Most of the questions I initially posted, which were either closed as duplicates or "not good enough," really did me a lot of discouragement. I wasn't learning anything by being told, "You did it wrong, but we're also not telling you how you could do it better." I agree with the first part; I probably sucked at writing good questions and searching properly. I think it's just a part of the process to make mistakes but SO did not make it better for juniors, at least on the part of giving proper guidance to those who "sucked".

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