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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

#921

Post by rob802 »

threecoins wrote: post #485
foobarbecue wrote: post #436

Earlier 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…

You're right - those comments are unacceptable. Honestly, it's out of character for that person. I've deleted them but will preserve them here:

> "Why not?" questions are vague and hard to answer satisfactorily. The unsatisfactory answer is: did you personally do the work to add this feature to the language? The language is open-source, you want the feature, so why have you not done it yet? Seriously, why not? You've asked a why not question, and you should be able to answer it yourself. Now ask every other person in the world why they did not add the feature either, and then you will know why the feature was not added. Features do not appear magically and then need a reason to remove them!

> Moreover, you say that the feature is simple and fits well, so it should be straightforward and simple for you do to the work, right? Send the team a PR!

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#922

Post by wpietri »

mvdtnz wrote: post #876
wpietri wrote: post #781

Earlier 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…

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.

I think this "first opportunity to be the bully" thing is spot on. Everybody learns from being bullied. Some of us learn not to do it when we have power; others just learn how.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#923

Post by brunoborges »

al_borland wrote: post #466
brunoborges wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as software is properly documented, and documentation is published in LLM-friendly formats, LLMs may be able to answer most of the beyond basic questions even when docs don't explicitly cover a particular scenario. Take an API for searching products, one for getting product details, and then an API for deleting a product. The documentation does not need to cover the detailed scenario of "How to delete a produ…

If the LLM is also writing the documentation, because the developers surely don’t want to, I’m not sure how well this will work out. I have some co-workers who have tried to use Copilot for their documentation (because they never write any and I’m constantly asking them questions as a result), and the results were so bad they actually spent the time to write proper documentation. It failed successfully, I suppose.

Indeed, how documentation is written is key. But funny enough, I have been a strong advocate that documentation should always be written in Reference Docs style, and optionally with additional Scenario Docs.

The former is to be consumed by engineers (and now LLMs), while the later is to be consumed by humans.

Scenario Docs, or use case docs, are what millions of blog articles were made of in the early days, then we turned to Stack Overflow questions/answers, then companies started writing documentation in this format too. Lots of Quick Starts for X, Y, and Z scenarios using technology K. Some companies gave away completely on writing reference documentation, which would allow engineers to understand the fundamentals of technology K and then be able to apply to X, Y, and Z.

But now with LLMs, we can certainly go back to writing Reference docs only, and let LLMs do the extra work on Scenario based docs. Can they hallucinate still? Sure. But they will likely get most beyond-basic-maybe-not-too-advanced scenarios right in the first shot.

As for using LLMs to write docs: engineers should be reviewing that as much as they should be reviewing the code generated by AI.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#924

Post by BigParm »

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 LLMs will learn from our interactions with them. That's why they're often free

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#925

Post by emodendroket »

al_borland wrote: post #470
emodendroket wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're going to diagnose pre-AI Stack Overflow problems I see two obvious ones: 1. The attempt to cut back on the harshness of moderation meant letting through more low-quality questions. 2. More importantly, a lot of the content is just stale. Like you go to some question and the accepted answer with the most votes is for a ten-year-old version of the technology.

> 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…

Usually that's resolved by saying "I want you to use v2" or whatever it is, which you can't really do with a Stack Overflow answer as easily.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#926

Post by emodendroket »

smcin wrote: post #412
emodendroket wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a basic problem that the original revenue model for the site just didn't work (I mean, they wouldn't have shut down Stack Overflow Jobs if that actually made them any money) and anything they were able to do to fix that pissed people off.

Stack Overflow Jobs was a superb, uncluttered, direct interface to the hiring manager, with accurate details about a position. So when they canned it (but kept their advertising revenue stream plus started "SO for Teams" in 2018), that was a major canary that the whole revenue model wasn't viable, at least for independent developers.

Well I think part of the problem here is that, by all accounts, developers loved it, but they're not the actual paying customer.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#927

Post by rob802 »

echelon wrote: post #151
fabian2k wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fixing loads of LLM-generated content is neither easy nor fun. You'll have a very hard time getting people to do that.

Hardly. - A huge number of developers will want to use such a tool. Many of them are already using AI in a "single player" experience mode. - 80% of the answers will be correct when one-shot for questions of moderate difficulty. - The long tail of "corrector" / "wiki gardening" / pedantic types fill fix the errors. Especially if you gamify it. Just because someone doesn't like AI doesn't mean the majority share the s…

Your points are arguing that the tool would be useful - not that anyone would build it. No one wants to curate what is, essentially, randomly generated text. What an absolute nightmare that would be

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#928

Post by fragmede »

rob802 wrote: post #927
echelon wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly. - A huge number of developers will want to use such a tool. Many of them are already using AI in a "single player" experience mode. - 80% of the answers will be correct when one-shot for questions of moderate difficulty. - The long tail of "corrector" / "wiki gardening" / pedantic types fill fix the errors. Especially if you gamify it. Just because someone doesn't like AI doesn't mean the majority share the s…

Your points are arguing that the tool would be useful - not that anyone would build it. No one wants to curate what is, essentially, randomly generated text. What an absolute nightmare that would be

> essentially, randomly generated text.

You oversimplified and lost too much precision. Try again?

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#929

Post by FrustratedMonky »

etyhhgfff wrote: post #872
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.

"firing up a sandbox VM and testing some solutions"

If the LLM can start up a VM and test a solution, to identify a new unique problem, and find it's own solution. That would be pretty impressive. I'm not sure they are really to that point. But some AI's are winning the Math Olympiad, so maybe it is happening. I'm sure this is the overall goal.

Re: Total monthly number of StackOverflow questions over time

#930

Post by josephg »

solumunus wrote: post #804
mannykannot wrote: post #793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite often, when my search returned a 'closed as duplicate' reply, I found the allegedly duplicate question did not accurately describe my problem, and the answers to it were often inferior, for my purposes, than those which had been given to my original question before the gate was closed.

This is because the real goal was SEO.

It doesn't appear to have worked.
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