The number of active users at StackOverflow started dropping in the middle of 2020, i.e. long time before ChatGPT release in the end of 2022.
https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/revision/192836...
Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
911–920 of 1001 posts
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#912Earlier quoted context omitted.
It still seems a bit too simplistic… no one imagined that Google could behave less than 100% virtuously in the future? Really?
I don’t think there’s anything virtuous or non-virtuous about it. The internet is a big place and search engines aren’t optimized to produce results according to singular sites’ idiosyncrasies. The obvious flaw in Stack Overflow’s bias toward closing new questions is that over time the best pages are also the oldest and most stale. They even locked questions with enough answers to prevent new content from being added…
Agreed, think we're getting warmer.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#913Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Like you go to some question and the accepted answer with the most votes is for a ten-year-old version of the technology. This is still a problem with LLMs as a result. The bigger problem is that now the LLM doesn’t show you it was a 10 year old solution, you have to try it, watch it fail, then find out it’s old, and ask for a more up to date example, then watch it flounder around. I’ve experienced this more times…
Then you're doing it wrong? I'd need to see a few examples, but this is easily solved by giving the llm more context, any really. Give it the version number, give it a url to a doc. Better yet git clone the repo and tell it to reference the source. Apologies for using you as an example, but this is a common theme on people who slam LLMs. They ask it a specific/complex question with little context and then complain wh…
I’ve specified many of these things and still had it fall on its face. And at some point, I’m providing so much detail that I may as well do it myself, which is ultimately what ends up happening.
Also, it seems assuming the latest version would make much more sense than assuming a random version from 10 years ago. If I was handing work off to another person, I would expect to only need to specify the version if it was down level, or when using the latest stable release.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#914Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe that this tension about what type of questions was baked into the very foundation of StackOverflow. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/09/15/stack-overflow-lau... > What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to…
> As moderation and curation restricted (changing the close reasons to more and more specific things - "it's not on that list, so you can't close it") meant that the content that was not as well thought out but did match the rules became more and more prevalent and overwhelmed the ability for the "spolskyites" to close since so many of the atwoodians have left. Just to make sure: I always got the impression that Atwo…
Jeff was the author of https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-... and was more focused on quality than community - his vision was the library.
Joel was indeed more community minded - though part of that community mindedness was also more expectations of community moderation than what the tooling was able to scale for.
And yes, they both were to blame for gamification - though part of that was the Web 2.0 ideals of the time and the hook to keep a person coming back to it. It was part of the question that was to be answered "how do you separate the core group from the general participants on a site?" ... and that brings me to "people need to read A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23723205 ) to understand how it shaped Stack Overflow.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/its-clay-shirkys-internet-we-j... (2008)
https://web.archive.org/web/20110827205048/https://stackover... (Podcast #23 from 2011)
Atwood: Maybe. But the cool thing about this is this is not just me, because that would be boring. It is actually me and Clay Shirky. You know, Clay Shirky is one of my heroes.
Spolsky: Oh...
Atwood: Yeah I know, it's awesome. So we get to talk about like building communities online and I get to talk about StackOverflow, you know, and all the lessons we've learned and, get to present with Clay. Obviously he's an expert so. That's one of the people that I have emailed actually, because I thought that would be good, because he is from New-York city as well. So we could A) show him the site and B) talk about the thing we are going to do together in March, because he needs to see the site to have some context. I mean I did meet him and talk to him about this earlier a few months ago, I think I mentioned it on the podcasts. But that was before we had sort of even going to beta, so there's really not a lot to show him. But I would love to show him in person. So we'll see if I'll hear back from him, I do not know.
2014 sounds about right for when it peaked... it was also when a lot of things hit the fan one after another. General stress, the decline of community moderation. The dup hammer was a way to try to reduce the amount of close votes needed - but in doing so it became "everything is a nail" when the dup hammer. It was used to close poor questions as dups of other questions ... and rather than making it easier to close questions that didn't fit well, corporate allowed the "everything is a dup" problem to fester.
That also then made Stack Overflow's search become worse. Consider https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/262080 which provides itself as a timestamp of 2014...
How much traffic do the questions that get duped to something bring? Especially the (currently) 410 questions linked to the Java NPE question.
All sorts of problems around that time.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#915Earlier 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. My personal single biggest source of frustration with SO has been outdated answers that are locking out more modern and correct answers. There are so many things for which there is no permanently right answer over time. It feels like SO started solidifying and failed to do the moderation cleaning and…
yes I noticed this as well, over the past few years, its happened again and again that the "Top Answer" ends up being useless and I found myself constantly sorting the answers by "Recent" to find the ones that are actually useful and relevant
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#916Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 moderation from the beginning. I was an early SO user and I don’t agree with this. The moderation was always there, but from my perspective it wasn’t until the site really pushed into branching out and expanding Stack Exchange across many topics to become a Quora style competitor…
I asked a question for the first time mid last year. It was a question about "default" sizes in HTML layout calculations, with lots of research and links to relevant parts of the spec. It was immediately closed as off topic, and there were a bunch of extremely vitriolic comments offended that I'd ask such a question on SO. It was briefly reopened weeks (?) later and then I guess closed again and now is deleted, so yo…
its not just you, I saw this happen to others' posts many times and it happened to me several times
I gave up on Stack Overflow when my jobs started requiring me to use Terraform and suddenly every time I posted a well researched and well formed question about Terraform, it would immediately get flagged and closed with responses that "Terraform is not programming and thus questions about Terraform should not be posted on Stack Overflow", which was insane to me because Stack Overflow has a "terraform" tag and category. If you visit it, you will see tons of users trying to post valid questions only to have the mods shut them down angrily.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#917Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The point here is you worked tech support so you were paid to answer user questions. However the answerers on So are not paid. Why should tyhy waste their time on a user who has not shown they have put any effort in and asks a question that they have already answered several times before?
> However the answerers on So are not paid. Why should tyhy waste their time on a user who has not shown they have put any effort in and asks a question that they have already answered several times before?
This is kind of a weird sentiment to put forth, because other sites namely Quora actually do pay their Answerer's. An acquintance of mine was at one time a top "Question Answerer" on Quora and got some kind of compensation for their work.
So this is not the Question-Asker's problem. This is the problem of Stack Overflow and the people answering the questions.
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#918Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you mind linking me to an example or two? I've seen this type of complaint often on HN, but never really observed that behavior on SO, despite being active on there for 15 years. I guess maybe I was part of the problem...?
Here is one fine example. [1] The person taking offense was member of C# language design team mind you. There are several such cases. This was particular question I stumbled upon because I wondered the same question and wanted to know what were the reasons. This was perfect Lucky Ten Thousand [2] moment for him if he wanted. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/59193144/why-is-c8s-swit... [2] https://xkcd.com/1053…
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Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#919Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 answer…
Why do you continue to ask for examples if you're just going to downplay them or explain them away like you did here?
Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time
#920Earlier quoted context omitted.
I asked a question for the first time mid last year. It was a question about "default" sizes in HTML layout calculations, with lots of research and links to relevant parts of the spec. It was immediately closed as off topic, and there were a bunch of extremely vitriolic comments offended that I'd ask such a question on SO. It was briefly reopened weeks (?) later and then I guess closed again and now is deleted, so yo…
its not just you, I saw this happen to others' posts many times and it happened to me several times I gave up on Stack Overflow when my jobs started requiring me to use Terraform and suddenly every time I posted a well researched and well formed question about Terraform, it would immediately get flagged and closed with responses that "Terraform is not programming and thus questions about Terraform should not be poste…
Yeah. You're not a real programmer. It's just terraform. You're a stupids and we're smaht, and you should go off into your little corner and cry while we jerk each other off about how smart we are.
Gee, I wonder why people don't want to use the site?