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Stack Overflow Is ChatGPT Casualty Traffic Down 14% in March
- dylanhassinger 3y agomaybe stack overflow could, i dunno, keep up with the times
- ChatGTP 3y agoHow would you suggest they do that now?
- nadermx 3y agoOffer a chat bot answer to every question posted?
- anshumankmr 3y agoThey have been very hostile to any such suggestion. There was a meta thread where someone made a design specification for a ChatGPT integration (as a food for thought) and the person was downvoted to oblivion. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/421836/6941400 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/421836/6941400
- seattle_spring 3y agoThe comments gave several extremely good answers as to why that might be a dangerous idea.
- ChatGTP 3y agoI can see why that would be controversial for sure. But I guess it is “AI” so ticks the box as a viable solution in 2023.
- jeron 3y agoI have a feeling that the SO CEO's blog post [0] about using posts for training data may also have an effect [0]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35605323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35605323
- tiffanyh 3y agoIt doesn’t help either that for the past 14-years, SO has always been quick to close questions and/or answers become out of date.
- Gigachad 3y agoEven when they aren't closing questions, the userbase is so insanely hostile to anyone who dares ask a question. ChatGPT is such a breath of fresh air after having knowledge gatekept behind an army of smug moderators for so long.
- throwaway290 3y agoNot my experience, but I have a few kilopoints there already. A well researched question will stay and I am thankful to mods who keep low grade stuff to minimum.
- ralph84 3y agoThat’s the point. ChatGPT has infinite patience for “low grade stuff”.
- throwaway290 3y agoThat's the point, humans don't. Why call them hostile to you if you are wasting their time By the way low grade stuff doesn't mean a basic question, it just means a question that shows no effort made to read, comprehend, understand, research. Pretty sure I came out fair bit more resourceful and fluid-intelligent thanks to SO rules...
- Gigachad 3y agoThey are hostile compared to most other platforms. I stopped using SO a while ago because it’s useless. You get much better results asking on a discord community where people are happy to help you out rather than spend all day scouring the site looking for posts to report.
- tsuujin 3y agoI find this to be really concerning if true (which I’m not convinced of, seems more like correlation than causation). The most amazing part of chat ai is its ability to be very convincing and yet factually incorrect. It doesn’t seem like it’s a secret that these chat apps spit out just plain wrong information routinely, I’m not sure why anyone would trust it with something important. SO has bad info too, for sure, but part of SO is peer review to help feel that out. “AI” is a black box and not to be trusted.
- perryizgr8 3y agoYou should try Bing chat. It provides citations for almost every assertion. Allowing you to get a quick summary/conclusion, which is also quickly verifiable if you want.
- williamstein 3y agohttps://www.phind.com/ https://www.phind.com/ is also similarly good, but for dev related content.
- anileated 3y agoI think it’s likely that, unless regulated, commercial LLMs will have a chilling effect on most human-created information sources. With eliminating the opportunity for authors to engage with information seekers (a chance to get constructive feedback, upsell something, show ads, see interest stats) will come reduced willingness of authors to publish. If you publish on StackOverflow only for LLM to gobble it up and no human even sees the upvote button anymore… why would you? You are basically an unpaid ghost content producer for Microsoft/ClosedAI at this point.
- two_in_one 3y agoIt opens an opportunity for shilling, pushing your agenda, and other ways of poisoning users' generated content. While LLMs will be brainlessly sucking in and replicating. Till they learn to check first and filter out obvious fakes. Still there will be not obvious. The problem is how to make money on this...
- p-e-w 3y agoStack Overflow is a casualty of its hostile atmosphere, of the elitism displayed by its most powerful members, of its past community moderation and advertising scandals, and of its stubborn refusal to implement features long requested by users. ChatGPT is just the executioner. If people are abandoning ship in droves the moment an alternative becomes available, you know just how bad your platform is.
- rixary 3y ago[flagged]
- 7e 3y agoStack Overflow could be the greatest website in the world; ChatGPT would still kill it. The experience is that much better. The universe is not fair.
- legends2k 3y agoI think the difference is the user's type: if a programmer is looking for code, sans any learning interest, then ChatGPT is handsdown the optimal choice; just get an solution, do copy-pasta and move who. If one is looking to learn, then I think SO is better. I've personally found the lazier devs jumping to ChatGPT as they are not interested in learning or asking smart questions [0]. [0]: https://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html https://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
- afarviral 3y ago
- PlunderBunny 3y agoI feel like the commentary on Stack Overflow answers is often as valuable as the answers themselves. I suspect that ChartGPT can't provide the extra details and nuance that SO does. Also, at the risk of being contrarian to most of the comments I've read so far, I've never had a problem with people at SO, or SO itself.
- MuffinFlavored 3y agosounds like a good business idea reddit discussion chains for chatgpt conversations
- dryrun 3y ago[dead]
- BoorishBears 3y agoSure it can.. Joining across CSVs, complete with OP taking the inferior option: https://rentry.co/gse58 https://rentry.co/gse58 Different answers because of vague context on an NPE: https://rentry.co/dok7i https://rentry.co/dok7i Closing down "How do I make a website" complete with passive aggressive commentary before a close: https://rentry.co/ysfe2 https://rentry.co/ysfe2 System prompt if you want to try it yourself: https://rentry.co/36e7u https://rentry.co/36e7u
- Arnt 3y agoYou haven't asked duplicate duplicate or expected the people at SO to serve you. Try asking a question along the lines of "why does this happen? see screenshot for details" with a text-only screenshot that uses three-point text as viewed by someone who matters. You'll have a different experience. Or try asking a question that's already well answered, and the answer could be found by searching for the headline of your new question.
- mirekrusin 3y agoIsn't SO content used for LLM training? How are they going to train them for new tools?
- famahar 3y agoI think we're entering a new paradigm for programming. AI is the tool. Anything that wants to be used heavily should have a training set ready for an AI to learn.
- wilg 3y agoShouldn't surprise anyone. Websites, apps, or services that primarily are databases of information won't be primary destinations anymore. AI tools offer a significantly better experience.
- dboreham 3y agoUgh. Correlation not causation. Unless one of the major search engines is sending queries to OpenAI that were previously pointed at SO, this doesn't make much sense. Perhaps the higher traffic in the past was from AI training bots, and now they're trained?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gwoolhurme 3y agoMaybe I’m slow and stupid, can someone explain to me how new things will be introduced to new forms of LLMs if it all slowly becomes replaced by LLMs? It seems a bit like an ouroboros of human generated content consumption. Also, SO is flawed that’s without a doubt, but it still even in the age of LLMs been really useful to answer questions that are somewhat tangential not pure code. I was having a problem with FairPlay DRM for live streaming with iOS 16 and SO had something to point me in the right direction. Chatgpt being trained on older data didn’t have the answer. What happens in the future???
- stocknoob 3y agoNew things will still be documented, which LLMs can digest. The documentation may have been auto-generated by a different LLM, no problem. Incorporating recent info into an LLM (fine tuning) is a solved problem.
- Vanit 3y agoThis, and I believe this is what Phind does. https://www.phind.com/ https://www.phind.com/
- NtochkaNzvanova 3y agoIf documentation were adequate, there wouldn't have been a need for Stack Overflow in the first place. At least for now, it still takes (human) intelligence to consume documentation and synthesize knowledge through experience with new technologies, at which point it can be communicated to others. LLMs may get to that point, but they aren't there yet. Also, good documentation explains not only the what and the how of a codebase (which LLMs may be able to summarize from the code), but also the why and the when (e.g. when to use one method or another).
- gwoolhurme 3y agoThe “why” is another great example too. When you document something you try to do so with some way of showing intent as well. While LLMs are so amazing (really). There is still a lot that I get curious about how it can be effectively used.
- raydiatian 3y agoI genuinely don't feel bad for StackOverflow. It's a toxic community. Good riddance.
- scrum-treats 3y agoIt might be worthwhile to point out that tens of thousands of people got laid off in March, again. No shade on ChatGPT (with the solid prompt it actually performs quite well, as @BoorishBears points out), but significantly less people are needing to access Stack Overflow, MoM.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- adamquek 3y agoAs a SO user/contributor, the reduction of traffic is actually great news. The adoption of tools like ChatGPT and Github Co-Pilot did do is filter out repetitive questions and eliminating basic inquiries that have been answered countless times. This mean that the posts will more likely foster genuine discussions around unique, specific use cases that automated tools may not be able to address. This will help elevate the quality of content and promote intellectual conversations among our community members. I don't see SO as just merely a repository. It's also a networking and collaborative channel, that may not be apparent to users who just drop by to get quick answers. The reduction of traffic would thus finally refocus SO back to this.
- Incipient 3y agoThe problem is that ChatGPT (and bing AI) draws heavily from SO - when LLMs starve these communities, they're cutting off their source.
- tzs 3y agoI've lately been frustrated by Stack Overflow and similar because of how they handle XY problems. For those not familiar with the term, an XY problem is where someone wants to accomplish X, they think that to do this they need to do Y, and they ask for help with Y. It often turns out that Y is not actually what they need in order to accomplish X. They should have been asking about Z. XY problems are common enough that people on SO often won't answer a question asking how to do Y until the submitter explains their X. If it turns out some Z is what the person really needs the answerers explain that and show how to do Z. Great for the person who asked the question. They learn how to accomplish what they actually wanted. But it sucks when I actually need to know how to do Y, and all searching SO turns up is those XY problems. Even more annoying I'm pretty sure I've run into ones where someone who really needed to do Y asked, noting that previous questions about Y all failed to actually tell how to do Y, and their question was quickly closed as a duplicate of one of the earlier XY problems that doesn't actually tell how to do Y.
- thefz 3y agoGiven that two of the three times I used ChatGPT for something it came out completely wrong, and the third failed to mention its sources, I can only dread the day copy-pasting from SO will be replaced by copy-pasting from GPT.
- danielrpa 3y agoQuora is next... I don't have anything against it, but I see hardly a reason to go to Quora anymore.
- kjsingh 3y agoA tangential question but can we assume that ChatGPT learns/sources content from SO?