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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

#801

Post by bmacho »

Salgat wrote: post #122
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legitimate questions being closed for no good reason (or being labeled a duplicate even though they often weren’t), out of date answers that never get updated as tech changes, to a generally toxic and condescending culture amongst the top answerers.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.

Seemed like for every other question, I received unsolicited advice telling me how I shouldn't be doing it this way, only for me to have to explain why I wanted to do it this way (with silence from them).

This is called the XY problem https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/66378 . You ask for X, I tell you that what you really want is Y, I bully you, and I become more convinced that you and people that ask for X want Y.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#802

Post by NobodyNada »

losradio wrote: post #778
Shog9 wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was definitely a bit of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy [0] at work. I worked there during a lot of the drama you allude to, and... It sucked, for everyone. But also... For most of SO's history, the vast majority of visitors (and this questions, answers) came in via Google. Not "search engines"; Google. This was pretty much baked in right at the start, and it effectively served as the site's primary user in…

Shog9, excellent comment and very apt. I have to point out that you were also part of the toxicity and bad tone. You very much were part of the problem. Moderation and staff were very much the downfall.

Shog9 was probably the best person on staff in terms of awareness of the moderation problems and ability to come up with solutions.

Unfortunately, the company abruptly stopped investing in the Q&A platform in ~2015 or so and shifted their development effort into monetization attempts like Jobs, Teams, Docs, Teams (again), etc. -- right around the time the moderation system started to run into serious scaling problems. There were plans, created by Shog and the rest of the community team, for sweeping overhauls to the moderation systems attempting to fix the problems, but they got shelved as the Q&A site was put in maintenance mode.

It's definitely true that staff is to blame for the site's problems, but not Shog or any of the employees whose usernames you'd recognize as people who actually spent time in the community. Blame the managers who weren't users of the site, decided it wasn't important to the business, and ignored the problems.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#803

Post by losradio »

NobodyNada wrote: post #802
losradio wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shog9, excellent comment and very apt. I have to point out that you were also part of the toxicity and bad tone. You very much were part of the problem. Moderation and staff were very much the downfall.

Shog9 was probably the best person on staff in terms of awareness of the moderation problems and ability to come up with solutions. Unfortunately, the company abruptly stopped investing in the Q&A platform in ~2015 or so and shifted their development effort into monetization attempts like Jobs, Teams, Docs, Teams (again), etc. -- right around the time the moderation system started to run into serious scaling problems…

His tone was extremely passive aggressive and rude. I don’t think he made the site better - he contributed to the downfall

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#804

Post by solumunus »

mannykannot wrote: post #793
josephg wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question I read an interview once with one of the founders of SO. They said the main value stackoverflow provided wasn't to the person who asked the question. It was for the person who googled it later and found the answer. This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. They were pr…

Quite often, when my search returned a 'closed as duplicate' reply, I found the allegedly duplicate question did not accurately describe my problem, and the answers to it were often inferior, for my purposes, than those which had been given to my original question before the gate was closed.

This is because the real goal was SEO.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#805

Post by oofbey »

mannykannot wrote: post #793
josephg wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question I read an interview once with one of the founders of SO. They said the main value stackoverflow provided wasn't to the person who asked the question. It was for the person who googled it later and found the answer. This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. They were pr…

Quite often, when my search returned a 'closed as duplicate' reply, I found the allegedly duplicate question did not accurately describe my problem, and the answers to it were often inferior, for my purposes, than those which had been given to my original question before the gate was closed.

I think many would agree that this policy was the single biggest moderation failure of the site. And it would Have been so easy to fix. But management believed fewer high quality answers were better. Management was wrong.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#806

Post by b112 »

NobodyNada wrote: post #802
losradio wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shog9, excellent comment and very apt. I have to point out that you were also part of the toxicity and bad tone. You very much were part of the problem. Moderation and staff were very much the downfall.

Shog9 was probably the best person on staff in terms of awareness of the moderation problems and ability to come up with solutions. Unfortunately, the company abruptly stopped investing in the Q&A platform in ~2015 or so and shifted their development effort into monetization attempts like Jobs, Teams, Docs, Teams (again), etc. -- right around the time the moderation system started to run into serious scaling problems…

Blame the managers who weren't users of the site, decided it wasn't important to the business, and ignored the problems.

This always cracks me up. I've seen it so many times, and so many books cover this...

Classic statement is "never take your eye off the ball".

Sure, you need to plan ahead. You need to move down a path. But take your eye off of today, and you won't get to tomorrow.

Maybe they'll SCO it, and spend the next 10 years suing everyone and their LLM dog.

You know, I wonder how the board and execs made out suing Linux related... things. End users were threatened too, compelled to pay...

SO could be spun off into a neat tiger, nipping at everyone's toes.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#807

Post by solumunus »

etamponi wrote: post #49

I 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 (…

Because what you’re describing is the exception. Almost always with LLM’s I get a better solution, or helpful pointer in the direction of a solution, and I get it much faster. I honestly don’t understand anyone could prefer Google/SO, and in fact that the numbers show that they don’t. You’re in an extreme minority.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#808

Post by solumunus »

specproc wrote: post #145
etamponi wrote: post #49

I 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 (…

What I always appreciate about SO is the dialogue between commenters. LLMs give one answer, or bullet points around a theme, or just dump a load of code in your IDE. SO gives a debate, in which the finer points of an issue are thrashed out, with the best answers (by and large) floating to the top. SO, at its best, is numerous highly-experienced and intelligent humans trying to demonstrate how clever they are. A bit l…

You can ask an LLM to provide multiple approaches to solutions and explore the pros and cons of each, then you can drill down and elaborate on particular ones. It works very well.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#809

Post by oofbey »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #397
hombre_fatal wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead. I was part of various forums 15 years ago where I could talk shop about many technical things, and they're all gone without any real substitute. > People don't realize what a massive advantage Google has over everyone else in that regard. Site owners go out of their way to try to block OpenAI's crawlers, while simultaneously…

What's sad about it is that SO was yet another place for humans to interact that is now dead. Whatever. I haven't seen a graph like that since Uber kicked the taxi industry in the yarbles. The taxi cartels had it coming, and so does SO. That sort of decline simply doesn't happen to companies that are doing a good job serving their customers. (As for forums, are you sure they're gone? All of the ones I've participated…

I’m sad SO died, even if they deserved it.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#810

Post by causal »

wavemode wrote: post #799
nolok wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another exemple being "Comments are not for extended discussion ! if you want to actively bring value by adding information, later updates, history, or just fun that cultivates a community, please leave and go do that somewhere else like our chat that doesn't follow at all the async functionnality of this platform and is limited to the regular userbase while scaring the newcomers."

"comments are not for extended discussion" is one of the biggest own goals of SO product development. Like, they had a feature that people were engaging with actively, and the discussions were adding value and additional context to posts, and they decided "yeah, let's kill this". The people who run SO have some sort of control-freak complex. If there's anything I've learned from the SO saga, it is that oftentimes jus…

Oh absolutely - when it becomes clear you have high engagement somewhere, adapt that feature to facilitate the engagement! They could have made comments threaded or embedded ways to expand it into the right forum, but instead they literally shut down engagement. Bonkers.
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