It makes sense to see the number of questions decline over time as people google questions and get results. It would be interesting to look at the number of comments and views of questions over time to see if that has declined as LLMs have driven declining engagement and discussion.
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
721–730 of 1001 posts
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#722Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, huma…
That's only because of LLMs consuming pre-existing discussions on SO. They aren't creating novel solutions.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#723Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I personally stopped contributing to StackOverflow before LLMs, because of the toxic moderation. Now with LLMs, I can't remember the last time I visited StackOverflow.
And you can't delete your post when you realize how awful it was years later! That anti-information sticks around for ages. Even worse when there are bad answers attached to it, too.
Fun story: SO officially states comments are ephemeral and can be deleted whenever, so I deleted some of my comments. I was then banned. After my ban expired I asked on the meta site if it was okay to delete comments. I was banned again for asking that.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#724Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh I love that game! (At least I think it's a game) You ask how to do X. Member M asks why you want to do X. Because you want to do Y. Well!? why do you want to do Y?? Because Y is on T and you can't do K so you need a Z Well! Well! Why do you even use Z?? Clearly J is the way it is now recommended! Because Z doesn't work on a FIPS environment. ... Can you help me? ... I just spent 15 minutes explaining X, Y and Z. D…
Tbf the problem there is probably FIPS more than anything else.
If someone is paying you to implement a security vulnerability and you've told them and you don't have liability, you just do it. That's how capitalism works. You do whatever people give you money for.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#725>This post was not virtue signaling enough and therefore closed as duplicate.
SO had the greatest minds but the shitiest moderation
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#726Earlier quoted context omitted.
I regularly use Claude and friends where I ask it to use the web to look at specific GitHub repos or documentation to ask about current versions of things. The “LLMs just get their info from stack overflow” trope from the GPT-3 days is long dead - they’re pretty good at getting info that is very up to date by using tools to access the web. In some cases I just upload bits and pieces from a library along with my quest…
they’re pretty good at getting info that is very up to date by using tools to access the web Yeah that's a charitable way to phrase "perform distributed denial of service attacks". Browsing github as a human with their draconian rate limits that came about as a result of AI bots is fucking great.
You know DDoS attacks are illegal, right? If you have proof that OpenAI is DDoSing your site, go sue them for millions of dollars.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#727Earlier 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.
They clearly aren't asking for the question to be resurrected.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#728Some 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…
>>what happens now?
I'll tell you what happens now: LLMs continue to regurgitate and iterate and hallucinate on the questions and answers they ingested from S.O. - 90% of which are incorrect. LLM output continues to poison itself as more and more websites spring up recycling outdated or incorrect answers, and no new answers are given since no one wants to waste the time to ask a human a question and wait for the response.
The overall intellectual capacity sinks to the point where everything collaboratively built falls apart.
The machines don't need AGI to take over, they just need to wait for us to disintegrate out of sheer laziness, sloth and self-righteous.... /okay.
there was always a needy component to Stack Overflow. "I have to pass an exam, what is the best way to write this algorithm?" and shit like that. A lazy component. But to be honest, it was the giving of information which forced you to think, and research, and answer correctly, which made systems like S.O. worthwhile, even if the questioners were lazy idiots sometimes. And now, the apocalypse. Babel. The total confusion of all language. No answer which can be trusted, no human in the loop, not even a smart AI, just a babbling set of LLMs repeating Stack Overflow answers from 10 years ago. That's the fucking future.
Things are gonna slide / in all directions / won't be nothin you can measure anymore. The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it's overturned the order of the soul.[0]
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#729Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I personally stopped contributing to StackOverflow before LLMs, because of the toxic moderation. Now with LLMs, I can't remember the last time I visited StackOverflow.
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…
Maybe there's a key idea for something to replace StackOverflow as a human tech Q&A forum: Having a system which somehow incentivizes asking and answering these sorts of challenging and novel questions. These are the questions which will not easily be answered using LLMs, as they require more thought and research.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#730Earlier 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.
Humans do not know what’s right. What’s worse is the phenomenon of people who don’t actually know but want to seem like they know so they ask the person with the question for follow up information that is meaningless and irrelevant to the question.
Hey, can you show me the log files?
Sure here you go. Please help!
Hmm, I don’t really know what I’m looking for in these. Good luck!