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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

#831

Post by pigpop »

cubefox wrote: post #369
shevy-java wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fundamental value proposition of SO is getting an answer to a question But the horrible moderation was in part a reason why many SO questions had no answers. I am not saying poor moderation caused all of this, but it contributed negatively and many people were pissed at that and stopped using SO. It is not the only reason SO declined, but there are many reasons for SO failure after its peak days.

There was, obviously, only one main reason: LLMs. Anything else makes no sense. Even if the moderation was "horrible" (which sounds to me like a horrible exaggeration), there was nothing which came close to being as good as SO. There was no replacement. People will use the best available platform, even if you insist in describing it as "horrible". It's was not horrible compared to the alternatives, web forums like Re…

It was bad enough that many people resorted to asking their questions in Discord instead which is a massive boomerang back to trying to get help in IRC and just praying that someone is online and willing to help you on the spot. Having to possibly ask your question multiple times before you get some spotty help in a real time chat where it's next to impossible to find again seems unimaginably worse than using an online forum but the fact of it remains and tells us there was something driving people away from sites like SO.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#832

Post by johnnylambada »

One thing you won’t get with in an LLM is genuine research. I once answered a 550 point question by researching the source code of vim to see how the poster’s question could be resolved. [0]

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/619423/backup-restore-th...

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#833

Post by eastbound »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #689
eastbound wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is an excellent piece of information that I didn’t have. If the company with most data can’t succeed, then it seems like a really hard problem. On the side, they can understand why humans couldn’t do it either.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#834

Post by throw-12-16 »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #713
throw-12-16 wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RTFM

TFMs are not a thing anymore. Most of them are merely collections of sparse random dots one might join by sheer luck only, granted no other knowledge of the system being attempted to document.

I don't know what you are building, but if a thing doesn't have comprehensive docs it doesn't make it into my stack.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#835

Post by zahlman »

wpietri wrote: post #791
zahlman wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not the case. Yes, it is. I have been active on both the main and meta sites for many years. I have seen so many of these complaints and they overwhelmingly boil down to that. And I have gotten so unbelievably stressed out on so many occasions trying to explain to people why their trivial objections are missing the point of the site completely. > I've seen many Qs marked as duplicate where the actual answer…

Have you considered that the problem here is not insufficient explanation of policy? There's this thing that some programmers do a lot, where it's the users who are wrong. Using it wrong, approaching it wrong, thinking about it wrong, wanting the wrong thing. Just not understanding enough the masterwork that the programmers created. What this view misses is that the users are the point. If one user gets it wrong, sur…

What you're missing is that random people who come to Stack Overflow to ask a question (of a sort that doesn't meet the site's standards) are not my "users". I don't care in the slightest about these metrics of "dead-ness", and showing them to me another hundred times will not change my mind about that.

Because from my perspective, it has never been about how many questions are asked per day, or how many ad impressions the site owners get. (I don't see a dime from it, after all.) From my perspective, way too many questions got asked. It is more than three times as many publicly visible and still-open questions, as there are articles on Wikipedia. For a scope of "practical matters about writing code", as compared to "any real-world phenomenon important enough for reliable sources to have written about it".

I am not trying to win the argument about what people want. I am only establishing that the goal is legitimate, and that people who share that goal should be permitted to congregate in public and try to accomplish something. I do not share your goals. The community is not like software, and "serving and adapting to users" does not benefit the people doing the work. We never arranged to have the kind of "users" you describe.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#836

Post by pigpop »

timcobb wrote: post #216
johnfn wrote: post #210

Some 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…

> I wonder if, 10 years from now, LLMs will still be answering questions that were answered in the halcyon 2014-2020 days of SO better than anything that came after? I've wondered this too and I wonder if the existing corpus plus new GitHub/doc site scrapes will be enough to keep things current.

[dead]

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#837

Post by mixmastamyk »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #780
mixmastamyk wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best answer so far, too bad way down here.

It still seems a bit too simplistic… no one imagined that Google could behave less than 100% virtuously in the future? Really?

It worked that way for its first ten plus years. Why would it change? Why/How could you plan for an unknown future. Personally I’m horrible at predicting the future, so I don’t blame them.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#838

Post by matsemann »

tomrod wrote: post #830
matsemann wrote: post #800

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about if it's "worthy of being asked", but mainly that many of us doubt the stories presented here without evidence. Time and time again examples are asked for in HN discussions about SO, but they're never presented. One other thing often missed is that people answer these questions on their spare time to be nice. A closed question wouldn't necessarily have gotten any good answers anyways. And if you've ever…

> Of course, SO is a bad fit for helping beginners This is the takeaway for myself and so many who have contributed to SO over the years, both questions and answers. Self-reflection as to why a service has become both redundant and a joke is hard, and had SO started in 2019 maybe they'd have relevance. I'm not sure I see what value they bring now or moving forward.

Thinking they didn't keep up with the times or that they should've made changes is perfectly fine. It's the vitriol in some of the comments here I really can't stand.

As for me, I also don't answer much anymore. But not sure if it's due to the community or frankly because most low hanging fruits are gone. Still sometimes visit, though. Even for thing's an LLM can answer, because finding it on SO takes me 2 seconds but waiting for the LLM to write a novella about the wrong thing often takes longer.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#839

Post by stirfish »

fragmede wrote: post #413
stirfish wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember when the R developers would ask and answer their own basic questions about R, essentially building up a beginner tutorial on stack overflow? That was a cool time

Human psychology is fascinating. If I say I'm cool, I'm full of myself. If someone else says that I'm cool, that hits different. So is reverse psychology.

Hey fragmede, you are cool.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#840

Post by wojciii »

I have a SO profile and I both contributed and used the site for some time.

I use the site from time to time to research something. I know a lot more about software than 15 years ago.

I used to ask questions and answer questions a lot, but after I matured I have no time and whatever I earn is not worth my time.

So perhaps the content would grow in size and quality if they rewarded users with something besides XP.

I don't use AI for research so far. I use AI to implement components that fit my architecture and often tests of components.

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