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

681–690 of 1001 posts

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#681

Post by sevenseacat »

Flow wrote: post #674

StackOverflow didn't feel like a welcoming and humane place the last 10+ years, at least for me. Actually I think it never did. It started when I was new there and couldn't write answers, just write comments and then got blasted for writing answer-like comments as comments. What was I supposed to do? I engaged less and less and finally asked them to remove my account. And then it seems like the power-users/moderators…

I don't think the reputation system ever worked that way - new users could always answer questions, but comments required more reputation.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#682

Post by fho »

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…

Then let me quickly say: thank you! I used that algorithm three times in different projects during my academic "career" :-)

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#683

Post by abanana »

zahlman wrote: post #537
porcoda wrote: post #13

Not a big surprise once LLMs came along: stack overflow developed some pretty unpleasant traits over time. Everything from legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers. For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better.

> legitimate questions being closed for no good reason They are closed for good reasons. People just have their own ideas about what the reasons should be. Those reasons make sense according to others' ideas about what they'd like Stack Overflow to be, but they are completely wrong for the site's actual goals and purposes. The close reasons are well documented ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 ) and w…

You seem to have filled this thread with a huge number of posts that try to justify SO's actions. Over and over, these justifications are along the lines of "this is our mission", "read our policy", "understand us".

Often, doing what your users want leads to success. Stamping authority over your users, and giving out a constant air of "we know better than all of you", drives them away. And when it's continually emphasized publicly (rather than just inside a marketing department) that the "mission" and the "policy" are infinitely more important than what your users are asking for, that's a pretty quick route to failure.

When you're completely embedded in a culture, you don't have the ability to see it through the eyes of the majority on the outside. I would suggest that some of your replies here - trying to deny the toxicity and condescension - are clearly showing this.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#684

Post by cracki »

braiamp wrote: post #269

Actual analysts here that have looked at this graph like... a lot, so let me contextualize certain themes that tend to crop up from these: - The reduction of questions over time is asymptomatic of SO. When you have a library of every question asked, at some point, you asked most of the easy questions. Have a novel question becomes hard. - This graph is using the Posts table, not PostsWithDeleted. So, it only tells yo…

What exactly do you mean by "asymptomatic"? The proper meaning of the word does not fit into what you wrote.

"Asymptomatic" means you have a cold but you show none of the symptoms, hence a-symptom-atic, no symptoms.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#685

Post by egorfine »

Obviously LLMs ate StackOverflow, but perhaps developers could keep it alive for much longer if they wanted to. LLMs provide answers, but only humans provide human contact.

And that last part is where SO failed by allowing a few people power trip over the rest of us. Kind of like reddit does at times, but harder.

I'm not sad.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#686

Post by bborud »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #207
bborud wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose all sites that have a voting component run the risk of becoming unpleasant. Hacker News, and we who frequent it, ought to have that in mind.

I think it has more to do with the fact that when you offer zero salary for moderators, you have to take what you can get, and it ain't good. I don't really see a connection to the voting mechanic.

Why do you think it makes a difference if they are paid or not? Or more to the point: what are you saying? That people have different standards when paid? That lack of remuneration justifies poor effort? Isn’t that a very transactional view of human interaction? Are we that transactional? Do we want this?

We’re talking about how communities can become toxic. How we humans sometimes create an environment that is at odds with our intentions. Or at least what we outwardly claim to be our intentions.

I think it is a bit sad when people feel they have to be compensated to not let a community deteriorate.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#687

Post by sevenseacat »

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, reading some of these comments.

It looks like a pretty clear divide between the people that wanted to ask questions to get solutions for their own specific problems; and those who were aware of what the site wanted to be and how it actually operated, and were willing to put in the time and answer questions, etc.

The sheer amount of garbage that used to get posted every day required some pretty heavy moderation. Most of it was not by actual moderators, it was by high-reputation users.

(I have 25K reputation on StackOverflow, and was most active between 2011 and 2018.)

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#688

Post by mlrtime »

al_borland wrote: post #470
emodendroket wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're going to diagnose pre-AI Stack Overflow problems I see two obvious ones: 1. The attempt to cut back on the harshness of moderation meant letting through more low-quality questions. 2. More importantly, a lot of the content is just stale. Like you go to some question and the accepted answer with the most votes is for a ten-year-old version of the technology.

> Like you go to some question and the accepted answer with the most votes is for a ten-year-old version of the technology. This is still a problem with LLMs as a result. The bigger problem is that now the LLM doesn’t show you it was a 10 year old solution, you have to try it, watch it fail, then find out it’s old, and ask for a more up to date example, then watch it flounder around. I’ve experienced this more times…

Then you're doing it wrong?

I'd need to see a few examples, but this is easily solved by giving the llm more context, any really. Give it the version number, give it a url to a doc. Better yet git clone the repo and tell it to reference the source.

Apologies for using you as an example, but this is a common theme on people who slam LLMs. They ask it a specific/complex question with little context and then complain when the answer is wrong.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#689

Post by wizzwizz4 »

eastbound wrote: post #486
zahlman wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can (and always were encouraged to) ask your own questions, too. And there are more sites like this (see e.g. https://codidact.com — fd: moderator of the Software section). Just because something loses popularity isn't a reason to stop doing it.

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.

The company tried this. It fell through immediately. So they went away, and came back with a much improved version. It also fell through immediately. Turns out, this idea is just bad: LLMs can't rephrase questions accurately, when those questions are novel, which is precisely the case that Stack Overflow needs.

For the pedantic: there were actually three attempts, all of which failed. The question title generator was positively received (https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/388492/308065), but ultimately removed (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/424638/5223757) because it didn't work properly, and interfered with curation. The question formatting assistant failed obviously and catastrophically (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/425167/5223757). The new question assistant failed in much the same ways (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/432638/5223757), despite over a year of improvements, but was pushed through anyway.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#690

Post by DrewADesign »

rerdavies wrote: post #543
DrewADesign wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had used the search feature you’d realize that many similar comments have already been posted on HN. Vote to close.

If only those who voted to close would bother to check whether the dup/close issue was ACTUALLY a duplicate. If only there were (substantial) penalties for incorrectly dup/closing. The vast majority of dup/closes seem to not actually be dup/closes. I really wish they would get rid of that feature. Would also prevent code rot (references to ancient versions of the software or compiler you're interested in that are no…

I think they should have had some mechanism that encouraged people to help everybody, including POSITIVELY posting links to previously answered questions, and then only making meaningfully unique ones publicly discoverable (even in the site search by default), afterwards. Instead, they provided an incentive structure and collection of rationales that cultivated a culture of hall monitors with martyr complexes far more interested in punitively enforcing the rules than being a positive educational resource.
Post reply on HN