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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

#891

Post by immibis »

sevenseacat wrote: post #672
zahlman wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the extent that moderation ever prevented questions from getting answers, that was by closing them. When a question gets closed before an answer comes in, the OP has nine days to fix it before it gets deleted automatically by the system. The value proposition is getting an answer to a question that is useful to a reasonably broad audience . That very often means a question that someone else asked, the answer to wh…

And that was the core problem with Stack Overflow - they wanted to build a system of core Q&As to be a reference, but everyone treated it as a "fix my very specific problem now". 99% of all the junk that got closed was just dumps of code and 'it doesn't work'. Not useful to anyone.

And 99% of the other stuff, that wasn't just a code dump and "it doesn't work", was also closed.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#892

Post by immibis »

cracki wrote: post #694
yatopifo wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m going to argue the opposite. LLMs are fantastic at answering well posed questions. They are like chess machines evaluating a tonne of scenarios. But they aren’t that good at guessing what you actually have on your mind. So if you are a novice, you have to be very careful about framing your questions. Sometimes, it’s just easier to ask a human to point you in the right direction. But SO, despite being human, has a…

"well posed questions" And that is exactly why so many people gripe about SO being "toxic". They didn't present a well posed question. They thought it was for private tutoring, or socializing like on reddit. All I can say to these is: Ma'am, this is a Wendy's.

So here's an example of SO toxicity. I asked on Meta: "Am I allowed to delete my comments?" question body: "The guidelines say comments are ephemeral and can be deleted at any time, but I was banned for a month for deleting my comments. Is deleting comments allowed?"

For asking this question (after the month ban expired) I was banned from Meta for a year. Would you like to explain how that's not toxic?

Maybe if you haven't used the site since 2020 you vastly underestimated the degree to which it enshittified since then?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#893

Post by culi »

csomar wrote: post #469
culi wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I can definitely see why this might feel hostile to a newbie. But SO explicitly intended to highlight really good well-formed and specific questions. Stuff that other people would be asking and stuff that wouldn't meander too much. It's simply not meant to be a forum for these kinds of questions. I think Reddit would've been a better fit for you

I don't really agree. Programming on our endless tech stack is meandering. And people come in all shapes, forms and level of expertise. I mean, sure, it's their platform, they can do whatever with it. But as an experience developer now, I still rather prefer an open/loose platform to a one that sets me to certain very strict guidelines. Also once you had negative experiences in SoF as a beginner, would you come back…

> Programming on our endless tech stack is meandering. And people come in all shapes, forms and level of expertise.

completely agree

> But as an experience developer now, I still rather prefer an open/loose platform to a one that sets me to certain very strict guidelines.

And that's also fine. It's just not what I think SO was trying to be. Reddit for those types of questions, HN for broader discussions and news, and SO for well-formed questions seems like a good state of things to me. (Not sure where discord fits in that)

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#894

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

immibis wrote: post #724
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbf the problem there is probably FIPS more than anything else.

If someone is paying you to implement a security vulnerability and you've told them and you don't have liability, you just do it. That's how capitalism works. You do whatever people give you money for.

I wasn’t referring to vulnerabilities, I was referring to arbitrary silly security theatre controls. But id hate to deal with you professionally. Gross.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#895

Post by googlehater »

davchana wrote: post #271
0xfaded wrote: post #225

I once published a method for finding the closest distance between an ellipse and a point on SO: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-g... I consider it the most beautiful piece of code I've ever written and perhaps my one minor contribution to human knowledge. It uses a method I invented, is just a few lines, and converges in very few iterations. People used to reach out to me all the time with…

I too, around 2012 was too much active on so, in fact, it had that counter thing continuously xyz days most of my one liners, or snippets for php are still the highest voted answers. Even now when sometimes I google something, and an answer comes up, I realize its me who asked the same question and answered it too.

I often forget just how much smaller and less siloed the internet was just ~13 years ago.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#896

Post by Shog9 »

losradio wrote: post #803
NobodyNada wrote: post #802

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This sounds plausible - I grew up in the Midwestern US, and thus "vaguely passive-aggressive" is pretty much my native language. The hardest part of the job for me was remembering to communicate in an overtly aggressive manner when necessary, developing a habit of drawing a sharp line between "this is a debate" and "this is how it is."

Sometimes I put that line in the wrong place.

That said... I can't take credit for any major change in direction (or lack thereof) at SO. To the extent that SO succeeded, it did so because it collectively followed through on its mission while that was still something folks valued; to the extent that it has declined, it is because that mission is no longer valued. Plenty of other spaces with very different people, policies, general vibes... Have followed the same trajectory, both before SO and especially over the past few years.

With the benefits of hindsight, probably the only thing SO could have done that would have made a significant difference would have been to turn their Chat service into a hosted product in the manner of Discord - if that had happened in, say, 2012 there's a chance the Q&A portion of SO would have long ago become auxillary, and better able to weather being weaned from Google's feeding.

But even that is hardly assured. History is littered with the stories of ideas that were almost at the right place and time, but not quite. SO's Q&A was the best at what it set out to do for a very long time; surviving to the end of a market may have been the best it could have done.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#897

Post by xnx »

Don't lose sight of one of the dreams of the early Internet: How do we most effectively make a marketplace for knowledge problems and solutions that connects human knowledge needs with AI and human responses?

It should be possible for me to put a question out there (not on any specific forum/site specific to the question), and have AI resource answer it and then have interested people weigh in from anywhere if the AI answer is unsatisfactory. Stackoverflow was the best we could do at the time, but now more general approach is possible.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#898

Post by Shog9 »

oblio wrote: post #852
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…

I swear that about 3 of your replies look like LLM content or at best "LLM-massaged" messages :-(

I was writing like a robot before robots could write, dammit!

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#899

Post by Shog9 »

zahlman wrote: post #471
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…

Oh, hey, Shog, good to see you doing well. It was a heck of a ride, hmm?

Yes indeed! Glad to see you over on Codidact; I suspect small, bespoke q&a will be the future of the form, at least after Facebook implodes.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#900

Post by Flimm »

zahlman wrote: post #537
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.

> legitimate questions being closed for no good reason They are closed for good reasons. People just have their own ideas about what the reasons should be. Those reasons make sense according to others' ideas about what they'd like Stack Overflow to be, but they are completely wrong for the site's actual goals and purposes. The close reasons are well documented ( https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476 ) and w…

> "why did you close my question as a duplicate of how to do X with a list? I clearly asked how to do it with a tuple!" (for values of X where you do it the same way.)

This is a great example of a question that should not be closed as a duplicate. Lists are not tuples in Python, regardless of how similar potential answers may be.

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