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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

#871

Post by shagie »

runxel wrote: post #864

Another note to add here: The whole system was stupid, too! What do you mean, I can only give answers, but not comment? While there is much more to say about SO's demise, the "interaction" on the platform was definitely not one of its strengths, either.

Comments have less visibility in moderation. This has made them spam / link farming targets in the past.

A lot of people come to Stack Overflow with the mindset that it is a forum to discuss something and have tangential discussions in the comments.

https://stackoverflow.com/tour

> This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat.

The "no comments until you get a little bit of rep" is to try to help people realize that difference from the start.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#872

Post by etyhhgfff »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #66

If nobody is on StackOverflow, What will LLM's train on for new problems?

GitHub Issues and Disscussions + searching the code base, fetching the docs and some reasoning on top. Maybe even firing up a sandbox VM and testing some solutions.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#873

Post by Cort3z »

I fairly recently tried to ask a question on SO because the LLMs did not work for that domain. I’m no beginner to SO, having some 13k points from many questions and answers. I made, in my opinion, a good question, referenced my previous attempts, clearly stating my problem and what I tried to do. Almost immediately after posting I got downvoted, no comments, a close- suggestions etc. A similar thing happened the last two times I tried this too. I’m not sure what is going on over there now, but whatever that site was many years ago, it isn’t any more. It’s s shame, because it was such a great thing, but now I am disincentivized to use it because I lose points each time I tip my toes back in.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#874

Post by sixseven »

I was tasked to add OpenOffice's hyphenation lib to our software at work back in 2010 when I was a junior dev. I had to read the paper and the C code/documentation to understand how it works but got stuck in one particular function.

It was such an obscure thing (compare to web dev stuffs) that I couldn't find anything on Google.

Had no choice but to ask on Stackoverflow and expected no answers. To my surprise, I got a legit answer from someone knowledgable, and it absolutely solve my problem at the time. (The function has to do with the German language, which was why I didn't understand the documentation)

It was a fond memory of the site for me.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#875

Post by bill3478 »

josephg wrote: post #305
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…

> 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…

If this were true, then treating any question as an X-Y problem shouldn't be allowed at all. I.e. answers should at least address the question as posed before/instead of proposing an alternative approach.

In reality the opposite is encouraged. For countless times, I've landed on questions with promising titles/search extracts, only to find irrelevant answers because people grabbed onto some detail in the question irrelevant to my case and provided X-Y answers.

This often also causes subsequent useful questions to be marked as dups even though they no longer contain that irrelevant detail. The appeal process is so unfriendly that most would not bother.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36068243

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#876

Post by mvdtnz »

wpietri wrote: post #781
closewith wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment sums up everything wrong with Stack Overflow. I strongly suggest you re-read your comments here and self-reflect.

Right? It's a perfect example of the problem. In college, I worked tech support. My approach was to treat users as people. To see all questions as legitimate, and any knowledge differential on my part as a) the whole point of tech support, and b) an opportunity to help. But there were some people who used any differential in knowledge or power as an opportunity to feel superior. And often, to act that way. To think o…

I blame the Internet culture of the late 90s early 2000s. Referring to your customers as Lusers and dismissing their "dumb" questions was all the rage amongst a group of nerds who had their first opportunity to be the bully.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#877

Post by lelanthran »

zahlman wrote: post #482
fragmede wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? The "human touch" is "you fucking moron, why would you ask such a stupid question!"

No; remarks like that have been vanishingly rare. The less-rare uses of "you fucking moron" or equivalent generally come from the person who asked the question, who is upset generally about imagined reasons why the question was closed (ignoring the reason presented by the system dialog). In reality, questions are closed for reasons described in https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 , which have been careful…

> It's just that those goals (i.e. "we want people to be able to search for information and find high-quality answers to well-scoped, clear questions that a reasonably broad audience can be interested in, and avoid duplicating effort") don't align with those of the average person asking a question (i.e. "I want my code to work").

This explains the graph in question: Stackoverflow's goals were misaligned to humans. Pretty ironic that AI bots goals are more aligned :-/

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#878

Post by matsemann »

Aurornis wrote: post #853
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…

> Time and time again examples are asked for in HN discussions about SO, but they're never presented. Having your SO question closed as off-topic or already answered isn’t believable to you? Just Google with site:StackOverflow.com and you won’t have to click through many results to find something closed. Spending all of the time to log back into the site and try to find the closed question just to post it to HN to ha…

> Having your SO question closed as off-topic or already answered isn’t believable to you?

It is believable. But it being a problem I don't see. If it's off-topic, that's sad for you but no reason to feel angry or it being "hostile" or something. It's just off-topic. Same if I started posting lots of local news from my city to HN. It's simply just off-topic and not what the site should contain. If it's already answered, being pointed to that answer by someone spending the time to digging it up is also not rude. Sure, you may feel bad because you feel someone "reprimanded" you or something. But that's on you.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#879

Post by bill3478 »

lurk2 wrote: post #426
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…

> This is why all the moderation pushes toward deleting duplicates of questions, and having a single accepted answer. Having duplicates of the question is precisely why people use LLMs instead of StackOverflow. The majority of all users lack the vocabulary to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers. Prior to LLMs, my use case for StackOverflow was something like this: 30…

> to properly articulate their problems using the jargon of mathematicians and programmers

I once distilled a real-life problem into mathematical language exactly like how the Introduction to Algorithms book would pose them only to have the quesiton immediately closed with the explanation "don't post your CS homework".

(My employer at the time was very sensitive about their IP and being able to access the Internet from the work computer was already a miracle. I once sat through a whole day of InfoSec and diciplinary meetings for posting completely dummy bug repoduction code on Github.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#880

Post by baq »

andy81 wrote: post #232
specproc wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

SO also isn't afraid to tell you that your question is stupid and you should do it a better way. Some people take that as a personal attack, but it can be more helpful than a detailed response to the wrong question.

The problem is the people who decide which questions are stupid are misaligned with the site's audience.
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