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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

#81

Post by eurekin »

palata wrote: post #32
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legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers.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.

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.

Same here. I just didn't want to expend energy racing trigger happy mods. It was so odd, to this day remember vividly how they cleanup their arguments once proven wrong on the closing vote. Literally minutes before it would the close threshold.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#82

Post by Someone1234 »

secondcoming wrote: post #61
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legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers.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.

How can we be sure that LLMs won't start giving stale answers?

They still use the official documentation/examples, public Github Repos, and your own code which are all more likely to be evergreen. SO was definitely a massive training advantage before LLMs matured though.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#83

Post by ivewonyoung »

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legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers.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.

>For all their flaws, LLMs are so much better

But LLMs get their answers from StackOverflow and similar places being used as the source material. As those start getting outdated because of lack of activity, LLMs won't have the source material to answer questions properly.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#84

Post by eterm »

Avicebron wrote: post #42

Are there any publicly available options to actually interact with real people about software development anymore? There doesn't seem to be anywhere that's accessible with something like a google search... Sure there are derelict IRC/Discord/$language forums, but of the handful I've been part of they aren't active or in the case of discord, weirdly disjointed. AI is great and all, but somewhere with a little bit of a…

Local meet-ups I guess?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#85

Post by sublinear »

Was already dying a decade ago, but AI pretty much guarantees we'll never see a public forum that useful ever again.

AI may be fine for people asking the basic stuff or who don't care about maintenance, but for a time SO was the place to find extraordinary and creative solutions that only a human can come up with.

When you were in a jam and found a gem on there it not only solved your problem, but brought clarity and deep knowledge to your entire situation in ways that I've never seen an LLM do. It inspired you to refactor the code that got you into that mess to begin with and you grew as a developer.

This timeline shows the death of a lot more than just the site itself.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#86

Post by dmezzetti »

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.

This change was happening well before LLMs. People were tired of being yelled at and treated poorly.

A cautionary tale for many of these types of tech platforms, this one included.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#87

Post by eigenspace »

jonahss wrote: post #46
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.

It seemed to me that pre-llm, google had stopped surfacing stackoverflow answers in search results.

Because nobody was clicking on them

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#88

Post by elevation »

Bratmon wrote: post #31
elevation wrote: post #19

There 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.

But surely transmitting information to actual SO is just as forbidden? And if you're making an internal-only site, it doesn't really need to be name-brand SO.

Stack overflow was useful with a fairly sanitized search like “mysql error 1095”. Agentic LLMs do there best work when able to access your entire repository or network environment for context, which is impossible to sanitize. For a season, private environments will continue to be able to use SO. But as LLMs capture all the good questions and keep them private, public SO will become less and less relevant. It’s sad to see a resource of this class go.
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