I used to joke that when SO goes under, I will move professions. The joke came from my experience of how many common issues in technology could not be solved with knowledge found via a search engine. I don’t see that niche as gone, so I wonder what is satisfying that requirement such that new questions do not show up at SO?
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
881–890 of 1001 posts
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#882Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is. This is literally not true. The rate you learn and encounter new things depends on many things: you, your mood, your energy etc. But not on the amount of your experience. > The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue a…
I don't know what your experience has been, but I do feel that at some point you will find yourself on or beyond SO's "knowledge frontier". The questions you land on will be unanswered or have equally confused replies; or you might be the one who's asking a question instead. I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself, but it felt quite thankless s…
> I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself
I was used to doing that, but then the moderation got in the way. So I stopped.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#883Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what your experience has been, but I do feel that at some point you will find yourself on or beyond SO's "knowledge frontier". The questions you land on will be unanswered or have equally confused replies; or you might be the one who's asking a question instead. I've "paid back" by leaving a high quality response on unanswered SO questions that I've had to figure out myself, but it felt quite thankless s…
No, you don't. Not only there are many examples of detailed stackoverflow articles written by absolute experts, you also need answer often for something trivial(which is like half of my chatgpt), e.g. how to export in pgadmin, or a nondescriptive error in linux.
> No, you don't.
When someone says "I feel like" and you answer "No, you don't", you're most certainly wrong :-).
I do feel like the parent.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#884Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People in this thread are missing another key component in the decline of StackOverflow - the more experienced you become, the less useful it is. This is literally not true. The rate you learn and encounter new things depends on many things: you, your mood, your energy etc. But not on the amount of your experience. > The harder the problem, the less engagement it gets. People who spend hours working on your issue a…
I think it is true, but not because you have nothing more to learn when you're experienced, but that there are fewer and fewer people on SO to answer the questions that you encounter when you get more and more experienced. I've answered about 200 questions. I've asked two, and both remain unanswered to this day. One of them had comments from someone who clearly was out of their league but wanted to be helpful. The pe…
The more experienced I got, the subtler my questions/answers. The few times I asked a question, I would start by saying "it may look similar to this, this and that questions, but it is not", only to see my question get closed as duplicate by moderators.
If the moderators are not competent to understand if your question is a duplicate or not, and close it as duplicate when in doubt, then it contributes to the toxic atmosphere, maybe?
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#885Earlier quoted context omitted.
The example wasn't even finding a right answer so I don't see where you got that.. Searching questions/answers on SO can surface correct paths on situations where the LLMs will keep giving you variants of a few wrong solutions, kind of like the toxic duplicate closers.. Ironically, if SO pruned the history to remove all failures to match its community standards then it would have the same problem.
"But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions." > "actually answered our questions." Read carefully.
Yes, it does answer you question, when the site lets it go through.
Note that "answers your question" does not mean "solving your problem". Sometimes the answer to a question is "this is infeasible because XYZ" and that's good feedback to get to help you re-evaluate a problem. Many LLMs still struggle with this and would rather give a wrong answer than a negative one.
That said, the "why don't you use X" response is practically a stereotype for a reason. So it's certainly not always useful feedback. If people could introspect and think "can 'because my job doesn't allow me to install Z' be a valid response to this", we'd be in a true Utopia.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#886Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thinking from first principles, a large part of the content on stack overflow comes from the practical experience and battle scars worn by developers sharing them with others and cross-curating approaches. Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc. It will be this shared interlocutor with vast swaths of experiential knowled…
> Privacy concerns notwithstanding, one could argue having LLMs with us every step of the way - coding agents, debugging, devops tools etc. That might work until an LLM encounters a question it's programmed to regard as suspicious for whatever reason. I recently wanted to exercise an SMTP server I've been configuring, and wanted to do it by an expect script, which I don't do regularly. Instead of digging through the…
1.5 years ago Gemini (the same brand!) refused to provide C++ help to minors because C++ is dangerous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39632959
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#887I 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 (…
> But losing SO means that we're getting an idiot friendly guy with a lot of credible but wrong answers in place of a grumpy and possibly toxic guy which, however, actually answered our questions. Which by the way is incredibly ironic to read on the internet after like fifteen years of annoying people left and right about toxic this and toxic that. Extreme example: Linus Torvalds used to be notoriously toxic. Would y…
Sadly, an accountable individual representing an organization is different from a community of semi-anonymous users with a bunch of bureaucracy that can't or doesn't care about every semis anonymous user
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#888[dead]
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#889Earlier 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…
Yeah, I think this is the real answer. I still pop into SO when in learning a new language or trip into new simple questions (in my case, how to connect and test a local server). But when you're beyond the weeds, SO is as best an oasis in the desert. Half the time a mirage, nice when it does help out. But rare either way.
I don't use LLMs eother. But the next generation might feel differently and those trends mean there's no new users coming in.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#890[dead]