Maybe the average question will be more "high level" now that all simple questions are answered by LLMs ?
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
71–80 of 1001 posts
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#72Stackoverflow is like online gaming--lots of toxic people, but I still get value out of it. Ignore the toxic people, get your questions answered and go home to your family with your paycheck.
It's surprisingly tame still given it interests tens (hundreds?) of millions of people at varying age and background and mostly when the mind is occupied by a problem. I always found it surprising there's not more defacing and toxicity.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#73Eternal September is finally over =)
It was impossible to ask certain programming questions. Asking there was truly last resort.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#74They will no doubt blame this on AI, somehow (ChatGPT release: late 2022, decline start: mid 2020), instead of the toxicity of the community and the site's goals of being a knowledgebase instead of a QA site despite the design. PS - This comment is closed as a [duplicate] of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46482620
Ironically they could probably do some really useful deduplication/normalization/search across questions and answers using AI/embeddings today, if only they’d actually allowed people to ask the same questions infinite different ways, and treated the result of that as a giant knowledge graph.
I was into StackOverflow in the early 2010s but ultimately stopped being an active contributor because of the stupid moderation.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Long before LLMs. Setting aside peak-COVID as a weird aberration, question volume has been in decline since 2014 or maybe 2016.
Stack Overflow would still have a vibrant community if it weren't for the toxic community. Imagine a non-toxic Stack Overflow replacement that operated as an LLM + Wiki (CC-licensed) with a community to curate it. That seems like the sublime optimal solution that combines both AI and expertise. Use LLMs to get public-facing answers, and the community can fix things up. No over-moderation for "duplicates" or other SO…
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Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#76This is a great example of how free content was exploited by LLMs and used against oneself to an ultimate destruction.
Every content creator should be terrified of leaving their content out for free and I think it will bring on a new age of permanent paywalls and licensing agreements to Google and others, with particular ways of forcing page clicks to the original content creators.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#77There are still airgapped places in the world where transferring information to offsite LLMs is expressly forbidden, but the offline LLMs available perform so terribly that they’re not worth using. An SO type application can be immensely helpful for engineering teams working in these environments.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Long before LLMs. Setting aside peak-COVID as a weird aberration, question volume has been in decline since 2014 or maybe 2016.
Stack Overflow would still have a vibrant community if it weren't for the toxic community. Imagine a non-toxic Stack Overflow replacement that operated as an LLM + Wiki (CC-licensed) with a community to curate it. That seems like the sublime optimal solution that combines both AI and expertise. Use LLMs to get public-facing answers, and the community can fix things up. No over-moderation for "duplicates" or other SO…
The fact that they basically stopped the ability to ask 'soft' questions without a definite answer made it very frustrating. There's no definitive answer to a question about best practices, but you can't ask people to share their experiences or recommendations.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#79I spent the last 14 days chasing an issue with a Spark transform. Gemini and Claude were exceptionally good at giving me answers that looked perfectly reasonable: none of them worked, they were almost always completely off-road. Eventually I tried with something else, and found a question on stackoverflow, luckily with an answer. That was the game changer and eventually I was able to find the right doc in the Spark (…
It's flat wrong to suggest SO had the right answer all the time, and in fact in my experience for trickier work it was often wrong or missing entirely.
LLMs have a better hit rate with me.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#80Not 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.
How can we be sure that LLMs won't start giving stale answers?
We can't. I don't think the LLMs themselves can recognize when an answer is stale. They could if contradicting data was available, but their very existence suppresses the contradictory data.