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Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

thediff.co

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Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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For many people (maybe even most people) who write code, programming is just a tool. I know a lot of people who program, and it's the least enjoyable, least interesting part of their job. We need to be mindful, and quite careful, not to adopt an attitude of, "if you don't love it, and it's not your passion, stay out and let the "real programmers" do the work." I absolutely despise painting. But I like doing home reno…

I concede that this is an entirely fair point, and one that I did not consider (mostly because we're on "Hacker News".

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At that point, the curve levels off, and as the number of typical questions die off because they've already been asked and answered many times, the number of new questions has to trend downward Yes, absolutely, and the article addresses precisely that point. But the questions graph shows a drop of about 40% at exactly the point in time when ChatGPT launches, which is much too extreme to explain away like that.

Except the graph cuts off before 2023, so it tells us nothing about the actual effect it had, it cherry picked the initial drop off (or worse, they just used https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends , didn't even look at the time axis, and went "this proves our point"). It's Q3 of 2023, if you're going to argue a decline, why are you not looking at the most important three quarters of data?

No it doesn't - note the axis marks are every two years.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#93

Not mentioned in the article is the negativity found with asking questions on Stack Overflow, where your question is marked as duplicate if it's vaguely like something else, if it's not worded exactly correctly, etc. A remarkable thing about asking ChatGPT questions is that you don't have to be defensive, you can just ask your question no matter how basic, dumb, or simple it is without justification. Seems a bad stat…

On the other hand, I have no doubt that it takes a lot of effort to ensure that stack overflow is full of high quality answers. The tendency of any system like that is toward entropy. The moderators might be forgiven for being a little too judicious in pruning similar questions and splitting focus where the benefit to the whole is to keep answers focused in one place.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#94

An interesting thing to me about SO is how their focus on being Dev Centric ultimately led to some problematic internal culture issues. This came up in a podcast episode I did and then turned up on twitter. At one point in 2013/2014, an exec asked me if any of the developers had ever treated me badly because I was a woman. My honest reply at the time was “not because I’m a woman, but they definitely have treated me b…

> But SO seems like an interesting case where they allow entitled behaviour of some devs to get out of control and it led to problems. This is hard to quantify, and to make objective. E.g. in a previous company HR once sent an email asking for feedback from employees, and one of my engineers gave some - polite, thoughtful, and clear. This caused quite an incident as the HR staff in question were not used to getting a…

How would you have filtered feedback that is polite, thoughtful, and clear?

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#95

Do y'all really use ChatGPT for coding questions? Every time I have tried, the answer I get is entirely wrong, and I end up going back to either first party documentation, or Stack Exchange.

Sure. Currently using it to help me figure out the data format liuliu[0] is using for their "Draw Things" SQL database, because I want to bulk export all my previous images and my entire knowledge of SQL can be written on half a postcard.

[0] Who is on HN; hello, nice app :) https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=liuliu

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#96
post #16

From my experience, interacting with stack overflow and other software related sister communities has always left a bitter taste in my mouth. Ignoring the elephant in the room that I do use SO everyday with some success, but it’s mostly replaced by ChatGPT. The ridiculous (IMHO) moderation under the guise of “we have only one purpose” often didn’t even align with that goal. The writing was on the wall. So many questi…

> we have only one purpose The problem to me always seemed like the goals of the company didn’t line up with the goals of many (most?) of its users.

I agree, with the caveat that "most" must be referring to the larger number of visitors posting questions, not the larger number of answers posted by a smaller number of contributors, nor the even larger number of readers who find an existing question and answer, read the answer, and leave with minimal interaction.

Most question-askers - who actually post a question - want to have a response customized to their exact problem. ChatGPT is infinitely patient, if a million users give it the same prompt a hundred times a day it will provide each of them an answer. They want to interact with it like a Discord chatroom - post a question, get answer.

Most answer-posters want to avoid posting the same response over, and over, and over. They want other users to interact with it like an encyclopedia of FAQs - or rather, questions frequently pondered but only asked once.

I'd argue that most answer-seekers probably want a single, high-ranking canonical question and answer as well; they don't want low-quality copy-pasted single-line responses in a chatroom. Maybe they upvote the pre-existing question, maybe they're just anonymous viewers. Stack Overflow the organization, like this group, wants the best-written, researched, articulated response to any particular question to rank highly on Google.

What's for sure is that no one looking for an answer ever wants to see "Closed as duplicate". The question is how you keep that from happening, unfortunately it's probably untenable to do anything but have a small cadre of community moderators (with all the self-selection trouble that causes) closing questions subjectively marked as duplicates and intensely frustrating the people who posted those questions. Nor does anyone want to (nor are they able to) scroll up through 500GB of chat logs to find a prior Q&A by someone else.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#97
I have never understood why people have so much contempt for SO/SE network of websites. To me this network is on par with Wikipedia in terms of contribution to mankind. This is the internet itself. Granted I have only ever asked a handful of questions there, so all I have is anecdotes to share, but the community was very welcoming, and straight to the point. Maybe it has changed now? I haven't asked any questions since a couple of years. A few anecdotes -- I am not a native English speaker and english lang stackexchange was a godsend for me because sometimes the kind of questions I had, my teacher could not satisfy me and I don't even know how I could ever explain the problem to a machine (LLMs). I am not a biology student, but at time I was just curious about the functioning of human eye, so I tried my shot at biology SE and had a wonderful discussion. I have asked a few philosophical questions on Physics SE as well with similar experience.

In my programming job I consult SO multiple times, and I have never once felt the kind of hostile discussion environment that people try to potray. SO is very valuable to me especially for questions that have less to do with documentation but more about the essence of programming itself. It disgusts me that in future I will have to communicate with a brainless LLM instead where I have no recourse if its answer doesn't satisfy me, nor I have the confidence in the correctness of its word vomit.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#98
post #51

Do y'all really use ChatGPT for coding questions? Every time I have tried, the answer I get is entirely wrong, and I end up going back to either first party documentation, or Stack Exchange.

There are some strategies to get it to work better. It’s great if you tell it to create a function that accepts (input) and produced (output). For example I recently had it come up with some date formatters that saved me a lot of time, eg, transform a date from MM-YYYY to “X months ago”, stuff like that.

>some date formatters that saved me a lot of time, eg, transform a date from MM-YYYY to “X months ago”

Obvs your use case may be wildly different, but I detest ms office for emails: 'received three days ago...Two days ago...'. Great, now i have to remember what today is and then do some mathematical gymnastics (i dont work m-f).

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#99

Some of my most recent ChatGPT interactions: 34.223.203.0/28 what is the end ip of this range? Write python code to strip out characters that are not alphanumeric or spaces How do make FastAPI not return nulls in the response model when values don't exist? Rewrite this javascript to python Braindead stuff that I would normally lookup on StackOverflow but ChatGPT gives me the actual answer instead of me having to sift…

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"please stop programming" - wrong, wrong, wrong.

It's a business, and some people rely on it for an income, ONLY. His "sin," if that's what it was for you, was saying out loud what lots of people actually feel.

Re: Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

#100
post #81

Some of my most recent ChatGPT interactions: 34.223.203.0/28 what is the end ip of this range? Write python code to strip out characters that are not alphanumeric or spaces How do make FastAPI not return nulls in the response model when values don't exist? Rewrite this javascript to python Braindead stuff that I would normally lookup on StackOverflow but ChatGPT gives me the actual answer instead of me having to sift…

Wouldn't you normally chose the answer marked as answer marked on Stack Overflow or the one with the most points? ChatGPT doesn't offer that kind of user feedback, so you have no measure if the answer is valid if you don't know the topic well enough

If I can find a question that matches mine exactly, sure. Otherwise due to the imprecision of searching on google, I'm often left to filter through results, and then in each result that seems relevant filtering through each answer that seems relevant, sometimes never getting a perfect match.

ChatGPT does offer user feedback of a kind though -- e.g. I can tell it "no, not like that, more like x" and it will take that into consideration.

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