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Inside The Decline of Stack Exchange

144 points by gadders 3y ago

adamgordonbell 3y ago
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 badly because I’m not an engineer”. https://twitter.com/lauradobrzynski/status/1664616242110427136 https://twitter.com/lauradobrzynski/status/16646162421104271... Ben: This was a meetup at, I think it was Denver 2014. We were standing outside an arcade. The evening outing was a lot of pinball fun and air hockey. And one of our community managers was standing outside, and we got to talking, and he said to me, “You know, I was actually kind of surprised. You’re a really nice guy.” https://corecursive.com/stack-overflow/ https://corecursive.com/stack-overflow/ It's interesting to me as a warning. I think treating developers really well is important. 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.
- throw1234651234 3y ago
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- veave 3y ago
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  - acyou 3y ago
    Based on what is it pretty clear that everything went downhill when engineers stopped calling the shots?
  - i80and 3y ago
    I don't think there's a polite way to put this, but to be honest this comment is an excellent example of what the parent is talking about. All companies have needs that engineers tend to be very poor at, and if the engineers are dominant and see the other members of the organization as parasites, that's a serious dysfunction and not by any means "normal".
    - WindyLakeReturn 3y ago
      Is there anything really special happening here? For a non-technical individual, it can be hard to tell when someone technical is providing value and when they are, to use the term in this post chain, being a parasite. A technical person has the same issues with non-technical people. I've seen different non-technical business areas have this issue with other non-technical areas. I've read reports where supposedly entire departments were cut and the result was that they mostly parasites and the business did better after losing them, along with times such a decision killed a company. I'm not sure there is anything really special with engineers in this situation. It seems like one of many varieties of the same problem with telling who is producing value and who is faking the appearance of producing value.
      - sudosysgen 3y ago
        Ultimately, the people making those decisions need to be technical enough to know. Having those decisions made purely by non-technical people is playing russian roulette. This is something that is in many ways easier in more technical domains because at least it's possible to semi-reliably see through the bullshit.
  - gonzo41 3y ago
    I work for a 'hard' engineering company. Hard in the sense it makes physical things and does physical things. They don't give a shit about software and any of the engineering around it. And I consider that a pretty good deal from working at a finance place where I was doing support dev work on their data warehouse. There they just saw me as an expensive cost center (I was probably not paid enough in retro) Anyway. Shoes on the other foot at SE. What surprises me about SE is that it has all these smart people and a big community but it has let google and the parasites scrape it to death.
  - hattmall 3y ago
    Yeah and I think an issue is how engineers think vs other people. What maybe seen as rude or negative is just an engineer optimizing for efficiency or technical correctness. Other people then tend to take things personally and attach emotion to situations where they are having to be corrected. I have this play out repeatedly in my personal life. I've found I have to simply let people do the wrong things or fail a little bit and gently guide solutions. Otherwise there will be emotional pushback that entrenches their position.
    - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
      "Optimising for efficiency" on a personal/personnel/social level is one of the most common forms of rudeness in every day life. It generally _is_ rudeness.
      - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
        Politeness, is of course, when you hate the other person so much that you waste their time with all the various social rituals.
      - Karunamon 3y ago
        Only when that appreciation for optimization is not shared between all participants. It is equally correct that someone who is not interested in social minutia is having their time wasted by having it inflicted on them, and this, too, is rude.
    - hooverd 3y ago
      > ...do the wrong things or fail a little bit and gently guide solutions That's getting someone to change their mind 101. Not an engineer exclusive insight. I think a lot of "oh engineers are so rational that's why people think we're so rude" is just post hoc rationalization for poor social skills.
  - duxup 3y ago
    I don't know if it is normal or not, but it certainly shouldn't be.
- thathndude 3y ago
  As a non-engineer user, I know I have regularly felt unwelcome in various ways.
- duxup 3y ago
  Entitled "special" people are a problem everywhere. Dev's who are labeled as high performers get greenfield projects that can be pumped out quickly / look good ... someone else does the maintenance, they get all the flack for an obvious bug that wasn't fixed even if they didn't make it. The random executive who is thought to be highly successful who jumps from department to department spreading his fingerprint long enough to make an impact and leaves quickly enough to avoid any responsibility for the results. I fear it is a human thing and people are really good at sensing when they can get away with things.
  - pbourke 3y ago
    As time goes on, I more and more have the feeling that maintenance is 95% of the value in any software system. A well-designed system at launch is not sufficient to provide sustained value, but competent ongoing maintenance is. Phrased another way, you can sustain value by maintaining a badly designed system but not by not maintaining a well-designed system. Ideally systems are well designed and well maintained but we don’t always have that luxury. Circling back to your point, it’s ironic that maintenance is the lowest-value activity in terms of big tech company reward systems.
    - Spooky23 3y ago
      Sometimes they can be well architected to a fault! I worked on a periphery of a big mainframe system that was designed and implemented before I was born. I think release 1 was in 1975. It still runs really well and is hard to displace because operationally, even though the people who understood it fully are retired or dead, they left behind strong materials so a moderately intelligent person can run everything. The “other” systems, old .Net, Java, etc that support the interfaces to the old app are hot garbage, and tend to steal the budget dollars that are needed to migrate off the 1970s stuff. My team had to fix one of these… argh.
    - duxup 3y ago
      When I worked tech support I got to know the "maintenance devs" pretty well. It was amazing how I'd end up on calls with the non-maintenance teams and they would insist X, Y, Z couldn't happen and no man ... maintenance devs knew it both could and was happening and would explain how and why. God bless those other non maintenance devs, they were good, but man they could take an RFC and turn it on its head sometimes.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > 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 anything but encouragement in feedback, and I advised him to filter feedback through me, his manager. Being "made to feel unwelcome" is both very real when you feel it, but looking slightly deeper it's not being made to feel unwelcome; it's feeling unwelcome. A mismatch of what's welcoming doesn't mean the person feeling unwelcome is correct; there may be no "correct" in that scenario. But it will be reported as though it is correct.
  - at_a_remove 3y ago
    How would you have filtered feedback that is polite, thoughtful, and clear?
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      Good question :-) You start by remembering that a lot of people have constant praise - they bought a new Thing™? "Well done you!" Say their friends. Or "You look sensational today!" Or whatever it is. Hyper-positive praise is very common, and any hint of anything else may well be jarring. Any improvement suggestions might need to either get thrown in the bin (even if they're valid and simple) or filtered through their manager, or have a guided conversation so they think they came up with it. It just depends on the person and your relationship with them, really.
      - at_a_remove 3y ago
        I guess what I am getting at is that, in this specific instance, I'm not sure there is anything to do. You either send it or not. It was polite, it was clear, and so on. Tonally, it was about as good as you can expect. So what is there to filter other than send/not-send?
- chucksmash 3y ago
  corecursive.com is your podcast?
  - adamgordonbell 3y ago
    Yes! Please excuse the self plug. I find these culture issues interesting and didn't mean to highjack the thread.
- deleted 3y ago
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duxup 3y ago
That was a really interesting. I do worry about the effect of sort of aggregating forces impact on places where content is created. We've seen it with news and etc already. Having said that with Stack Overflow the real reason I hit ChatGPT first in many cases is FRICTION. The UI, the users, the answers that are technically correct but "weird". It's a lot of filtering I have to do as a user that I don't do with ChatGPT or other AI tools.
- JimtheCoder 3y ago
  "the users..."weird"" I would have chosen another word for them...
- digging 3y ago
  I guess I'm just used to it now, but I kind of like the UI. It's easy to skim the page to find the part I'm looking for.
  - fjfuvucucuc 3y ago
    [dead]
- gostsamo 3y ago
  You can generalize it to every market where the proxy owns the relationship with the client and captures the generated value. UI or whatever, if ChatGPT kills Stack Overflow, we will be in a situation where the shared knowledge will be at the level of 2021 and everything later will be with declining quality due to lack of data. I'd say that it is in OpenAI's interest to pay for SO and Redit so that they don't kill the hen with the golden eggs.
  - valine 3y ago
    You’re assuming the bulk of ChatGPT’s coding knowledge comes from stack overflow. I suspect training directly on code bases and documentation is more important.
    - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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DrBazza 3y ago
ML works well, when it is only trained on correct data. ML trained on all the things ever written about programming is going to get things wrong quite a lot of the time, and you'll only have the context of its reply to you, for you to figure out whether the ML answer is correct. And of course, ML always wants to please you with an answer. SO, on the other hand has accepted answers, and upvoted answers that are easier to decide on whether they're correct (or what you're actually looking for). And there's more nuance to it as well.
- kodra 3y ago
  I found it interesting (and kinda worrisome) that some fine-tuned Llama 2 models are trained with GPT-4 generated data. So if GPT-4 got something wrong, the error would propagate to a lot open source models.
- aCoreyJ 3y ago
  ML you can actually give context and a very specific question but SO you have to search and hopefully find a similar enough question that has an answer that isn't extremely outdated
  - hedora 3y ago
    You can give it context, and it will incorporate the context into the text of its response. Good luck figuring out if it incorporated the context in the content of the answer though. The internet already had too many low quality, misinformed pages. With Chat GPT, it now has an infinite number of pages like that. I’m not sure that makes a qualitative difference.
- js8 3y ago
  There is also regression to the mean. Human experts can sort out through advice and by reflecting on it, pick only the best. ChatGPT will give you, at best, average opinion. It won't help you get to the top, because the top is an outlier.
- Someone 3y ago
  > ML works well, when it is only trained on correct data. Is that correct? I would think that its ‘interpolation’ and ‘extrapolation’ capabilities can easily make it produce incorrect statements. As a simple example, train it on “π is a number”, “1 is a number”, “3/7 is a number”, “1.3457 is a number”, etc. and “1 is a rational number”, “3/7 is a rational number”, “1.3457 is a rational number”, etc. and I give you a good chance that it will ‘think’ “π is a rational number”.
discors 3y ago
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 questions that could have served answers are locked, deleted, and unfortunately, never asked due to the unpleasantness of dealing with the moderation. I speak for myself.
- rejectfinite 3y ago
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- throwaway154 3y ago
  Seconded.
- duxup 3y ago
  ChatGPT at least seems like it is trying to help me. The meta games going on in SO are a whole lot more of a mess and ChatGPT is more than happy to hear my question a 3rd time and spit out the same answer as before but change a few things. SO, not so much.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    I use chatgpt as a rubber duck who I’m suspicious of. Way too often it just comes up with fictional features
    - duxup 3y ago
      I get wrong answers too, but they're pretty easy to figure out fast and if I rephrase I get what I need. It's not like I'm not validating SO answers, there's not any extra steps from my SO experience. Also SO likes to give oddly, technically correct, but also hard to work with code sometimes to the point of being unusable and I take someone else's example anyway. ChatGPT is really good at making super generic answers and quick iterations / alterations. ChatGPT's power is often in the "conversation" where I add or take things away or change things "I need to break out X,Y,Z before I render it because..." and blamo I get new code. SO has none of that.
OliverJones 3y ago
I would really like to see what Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, the original creators of Stack Overflow, have to say about the current state of affairs. Their business model was recruiting by identifying people with specific skills, and it was effective. I hired and was hired that way. (They sold it years ago to a South African private equity venture and made the pile of money they deserved.)
- kodra 3y ago
  Someone should feed an LLM all the Joel on Software articles and ask it to comment on Stack Overflow. But a serious question: is Joel still in charge of SO? Has he retired?
  - adamgordonbell 3y ago
    They sold it and in retrospect they really nailed the timing of the sale.
- yankput 3y ago
  I think it was not really making money the whole time they operated it though and the job finding angle wasn’t really making that much money, neither was the private enterprise SO thing
pythonbase 3y ago
To every rise, there's a fall. Wonder which platform is going to accommodate the know-it-alls of Stack Exchange. Reddit maybe.
dnissley 3y ago
The opening Google trends graph doesn't match the preceding claim about a material decline in usage at all... it says a lot more about the extraordinary rise of chatgpt (especially since most people aren't using chatgpt for programming questions). It feels like a "Facebook is dead" type of argument: popular but wrong.
kwstas 3y ago
I really don't buy it. There is considerably more interest in google trends for ChatGPT compared to StackOverflow. But I dont see one replacing the other. At least for me. I do not believe the google trend graphs,like "the scariest graph", in this post accurately reflect a decline of SO. There is a place for AI tools and StackOverflow is not the friendliest of places but the quality disparity between the answers you get when comparing the two is very clear to me. > This year, overall, we’re seeing an average of ~5% less traffic compared to 2022. Stack Overflow remains a trusted resource for millions of developers and technologists. [...] Conversely, in April of this year, we saw an above average traffic decrease (~14%), which we can likely attribute to developers trying GPT-4 after it was released in March. https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/08/08/insights-into-stack-overflows-traffic/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/08/08/insights-into-stack-ov...
- jeroenvlek 3y ago
  Agreed. ChatGPT might overtake StackOverflow, but that first graph does not suggest it, because StackOverflow itself remains constant, it doesn't decline in that graph.
- dustincoates 3y ago
  The Google Trends graph stuck out to me. You're comparing something that didn't exist before December and had broad appeal, to something that people arrive at generally by searching a question. They aren't at all comparable. (I imagine you'd see the same graph if you compared ChatGPT with Facebook. Doesn't mean ChatGPT is replacing social media.)
SamBorick 3y ago
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.
- sitzkrieg 3y ago
  same here
- reidjs 3y ago
  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.
  - Ylpertnodi 3y ago
    >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).
- valine 3y ago
  For complex questions GPT4 works much better than 3.5.
- LanceJones 3y ago
  I'm a 56 year-old product marketer who used ChatGPT (plus Midjourney) to build an entire SaaS application and landing page: creatormail.io I've had some seasoned developers review my (ChatGPT's) Python and got positive feedback with some constructive suggestions.
  - yankput 3y ago
    The avatar people on the front page have 3, 4 and 6 fingers so it checks out, it’s AI generated
laichzeit0 3y ago
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 <snippet of javascript code> Braindead stuff that I would normally lookup on StackOverflow but ChatGPT gives me the actual answer instead of me having to sift through comments. Also the last one is not something that's suited to StackOverflow. I feel I may be getting dumber, but also programming is not all that interesting to me that I would care to remember the details of any of these things.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
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  - Waterluvian 3y ago
    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 renovations myself.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
      I concede that this is an entirely fair point, and one that I did not consider (mostly because we're on "Hacker News".
      - sanderjd 3y ago
        Ironically, I think this is more true of "Hacker News" than on other more programming-focused forums. I would describe the ethos here as "innovative problem-solving using computer technology". Whether that involves programming is totally beside the point. It has largely been the case since this site launched that most of the solutions do involve programming, but there's no reason they must. I think lots of non-programmer entrepreneur and product manager types hang out here, because of exactly this.
dweekly 3y ago
I should've been a great fit for stack exchange. I love technical communities and have been writing code for several decades. But they did not have a particularly welcoming experience for new contributors (perhaps by design?) so I wasn't ever really able to get the flywheel started and never ended up contributing much. I wonder if there's a systems lesson to be learned here around communities that do a good job welcoming new people and creating a magical onboarding experience staying vibrant for longer.
- cole-k 3y ago
  I don't think that the bad newcomer experience is by design. But I do think that it could be a lot better with a redesign. Here's how I've seen it played out before: --- johnnydoe2002 posts a question titled "How do I get my code to work?" with two sentences explaining their problem and an attached screenshot of their code. Within two minutes it gets downvoted thrice, flagged seven times as vague, and modman♦ closes the question, but not before posting the comment reply "Welcome to SO! Thank you for your interest, blah blah, your question has been closed because it needs clarification, blah blah, [link to new user portal]" OK maybe that was a bit hyperbolic and most new users aren't that bad, so let's say johnnydoe2002 is undeterred by this and actually formats and titles their question in a reasonable way. Within four minutes it has one short answer from repseeker and a long-form answer that is more of a code review from overeagerverbosity. The question gets no upvotes despite having two answers. Within seven minutes poweruser98 closes the question as duplicate because it received enough flags. If I were johnnydoe2002, I would have a mix of feelings. On the one hand, someone (two people, in fact!) answered my question; on the other hand, it was summarily closed and nobody found it interesting. I can clearly tell that I am not a part of the "in-group." But I can also commiserate with modman♦ and poweruser98. johnny's question only adds noise and they clearly didn't read the contribution guidelines. The mods and power users are willing to be nice, but they don't have the time to hold anyone's hand: in the past ten minutes they've had to deal with all sorts of questions from larryloe2001, minnymoe2003, and randyroe2000. I wouldn't be surprised if for every useful question on SO there are two that have to be closed. --- I honestly think that changes in phrasing and formatting could help the new user experience a lot. Like if instead of closing questions as duplicates, the mod/user in question would post an answer that says "I think this other thread answers your question" and the page is invisibly redirected everywhere else to the other thread. Essentially "shadow closing" so that it appears to the new user as if they just received immediate feedback in the form of a (helpful) answer, while not being told that they are bad because they dared post a duplicate. Or instead of closing a question as "needs clarification," sending it back to the edit modal with some adjoining commentary or links that explains the clarification it needs. I think that for a community with standards these exacting, most users will not be able to just pop in - which is difficult because we usually refer to SO in passing. But I also think that those exacting standards can be upheld without stomping over new users with downvotes and close votes.
j2kun 3y ago
This article does not really have any inside knowledge, nor much proof about decline. It is extrapolating and hypothesizing from graphs.
TheRealPomax 3y ago
Looking at that graph though, what it tells me is that stackoverflow was entirely unaffected by ChatGPT, and the giant spike is just humanity collectively jumping on ChatGPT in addition to folks using Stackoverflow in exactly the same way as before? Same for that "answers over time" graph: that's literally what you'd expect for a knowledge base. There has to be an initial trend upwards as the site starts to accumulate information (i.e. questions with answers, not just questions) and initially gains popularity as a place to get help by asking questions. But, as the number of questions and answers increases, the utility changes from a place to "get help by asking questions" to "a place to get help by searching for answers". At that point, the curve levels off, and as the number of typical beginner and intermediate questions die off because they've already been asked and answered many times, the number of new questions has to trend downward. It'll be slow, because we're constantly inventing new programming languages, libraries, frameworks, etc, but the majority of questions for those are simply duplicates of things asked about previous languages, libraries, and frameworks, with their answers being perfectly usable by folks looking for answers. And this is exactly the graph we see: rather than a sign of decline, it's a graph that shows the change from a predominantly Q&A site to predominantly being a knowledge repository. ChatGPT will, of course, have some impact on the graph, but the number of posts on Stackoverflow today that are "How do I X? I asked ChatGPT but that didn't help me" is staggering. ChatGPT may have initially driven down searches across the rest of the web, from Google to Stackoverflow to your mom's recipe website, but the novelty's already worn off, and overall it's done precious little to cut into the utility of Stackoverflow, as far as this data suggests.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  This is a good point. With the infinite number of uses outside of programming, you wouldn’t expect to see SO interest correlate with GPT. And if it’s not negative that’s a win. SO has accessibility problems for beginners and a meta game for more advanced users. But there is no evidence of a death spiral here. If anything… GPT could help SO by relieving the massive number of basic questions that GPT actually can answer.
  - TheRealPomax 3y ago
michaelbuckbee 3y ago
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 state of things that the inhuman AI is extending more grace than the human community.
- idiotsecant 3y ago
  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.
- the_jeremy 3y ago
  If you ask a bad question on SE (leave "bad" to be defined separately), you waste time of people who try to answer it, and of people who stumble across it hoping that it relates to them and solves their problem. If you ask a bad question to ChatGPT, you waste no one's time but your own. If answering SE was a job where you got paid, I would expect a lot more hand-holding (and some amount of kindness, to keep the revenue stream coming back), but instead, the people who answer questions do it more-or-less for fun. Having someone waste your time isn't fun.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    In those cases it's easy enough to just move on to another question rather than shut down the discussion. It's not like anyone's being forced to answer.
    - the_jeremy 3y ago
      But as an answerer, you will empathize more with the other answerers than the askers. You don't want the other answerers to also waste their time on this question, so you close it / downvote / mark it as duplicate.
cornholio 3y ago
I wouldn't exaggerate the death of Stack Exchange, it seems like they have a nice moat and are well positioned to change the future licensing terms of its answers and forbid using them for training AI. They have already banned machine generated content. When the question of training legality will be settled in courts - predictably, not to the advantage of the AI companies - Stack Exchange will be left with the human network generating the content, while AI companies will need to license any new answers it they don't want their models to remain stale and out of date.
kodra 3y ago
The title: Inside the Decline of Stack Exchange The content: A random guy looked at Google trend charts and fabricated some conclusions. The opposite of "inside".
no_time 3y ago
to me it looks like its too early to draw conclusions from the programming question volume graph. But if it is indeed true that LLMs are leaving SO in the dust, thats crazy. I’m in my 20’s and this is the first time I feel like my work routine and ways of interacting with tech is getting antiquated. God damn.
sarthak-ag 3y ago
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.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  Who shows contempt for SO? I don't see much of that, personally. Whenever it goes down, I see a lot of jokes about how nobody can do their job. The linked article agrees with you that it's "one of the greatest compendia of human knowledge ever produced".
- birdstheword5 3y ago
  You're right. But I think it can really vary based on which community you ask in. I think most people dislike how hostile the main stack overflow site is to beginners, who despite being the ones who need the most help, are the most likely to get their question closed/ downvoted. It's unfortunately necessary to maintain the high quality of the site.
  - tivert 3y ago
tomrod 3y ago
I've found contributing questions or answers to SE/SO to be a lot of like hanging out in IRC channels dedicated to C -- a lot of blowhards tend to hang around the watering hole, berating people for lack of knowledge for some reason or another, expressing it in a variety of in-group approved ways. It becomes tiresome to wade through the self-important moderation to get to actual content. That said, spam and unmoderated channels are clearly worse too. I'm not sure how to get to something in the middle of that Laffer curve.
jaredchung 3y ago
If we believed ChatGPT was the cause of an SO decline, then I'd expect it to also cause a decline in Google searches for programming queries. Here's the Google Trends data for two super-common error codes and one more conceptual programming search query: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=TypeError,ValueError,react%20architecture&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=... Maybe a little something going on with typeerror? Or just noise. But it definitely doesn't look to me like evidence supporting the article's claim.
JasonPunyon 3y ago
I mean fine, write an article that overweights recent events to weave a tale of the decline of Stack Exchange...but don't leave out the moderator strike, the data dump fiasco, or the CEO that simply doesn't get it. Jon Ericson's writing on the issue is much more informative. https://jlericson.com/ https://jlericson.com/
AdamH12113 3y ago
This is a bit pedantic, but there is a difference between: 1. Stack Exchange, a network of Q&A sites built around a single model 2. Stack Overflow, a specific Q&A site for questions about programming, on which that network was founded Programming- and computing-related SE sites are the most popular, but they are not the only ones. ChatGPT cannot read a circuit schematic, should not be used for legal questions, probably won't recognize an obscure science fiction book based on one plot element you hazily remember, and in general is not a reliable expert in anything. I say this is pedantic because if the programming sites "decline" they'll probably take the rest of the network with them, but as a long time denizen of EE.SE I would like if it people at least recognized that SE is used for more interesting things than "how do I do [basic programming task X]?".
Sparkyte 3y ago
I forsee any social media driven board including that of tech to have an eventual decline. As that is the way of technology, something newer and more relevent of the masses that utilize arise.
hobs 3y ago
One thing that's interesting to me about the consistent complaints about moderators is that SO moderators are elected and only really held accountable by other moderators. I almost was a moderator for one of the SO sister sites, but I thought it was just too much thankless work, and I can understand why it yields petulant people who would rather see less content that conforms to their expectations than to create and make space for new ways of doing things. The content itself is an attractant to people like that, once you have an established corpus to corral you perceive ownership and want to "protect" it. I genuinely don't know if there's any way to fix what I see as inherent problems in online communities, that generate "open source" knowledge at least.
shadowgovt 3y ago
Author seems to be doing a lot of reasoning from a hockey-stick graph that's less than a year old. I'd give it time to see if that line keeps trending upward or the line crashes (as hype gives way to "Wait this tool is unreliable", which it may).
1letterunixname 3y ago
It follows the arc of most things including Quora and somewhat generally other popular ventures like Snap, Facebook, MySpace, AOL/AIM, and CompuServe. The initial Cambrian explosion slowly changes from cool obscurity to hype as time goes on and the shine fades. There's also a supply and demand problem of double-ended Q&A sites: there's rarely direct incentives to give away subject matter expertise. There are indirect incentives such as reputation, but behind nicknames, this doesn't necessarily translate into industry reputation. Furthermore, there are potential human language and subject matter terminology difficulties of throwing geographically-, and industry-diverse groups of users together. The platform should attempt to ameliorate language differences and steer user-contributed content away from devolving into ego battles, bikeshedding, nitpicking, or handwaving.

144 points by gadders 3y ago

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 badly because I’m not an engineer”. https://twitter.com/lauradobrzynski/status/1664616242110427136 https://twitter.com/lauradobrzynski/status/16646162421104271... Ben: This was a meetup at, I think it was Denver 2014. We were standing outside an arcade. The evening outing was a lot of pinball fun and air hockey. And one of our community managers was standing outside, and we got to talking, and he said to me, “You know, I was actually kind of surprised. You’re a really nice guy.” https://corecursive.com/stack-overflow/ https://corecursive.com/stack-overflow/ It's interesting to me as a warning. I think treating developers really well is important. 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.

throw1234651234 3y ago
[flagged]
veave 3y ago
[flagged]
- acyou 3y ago
  Based on what is it pretty clear that everything went downhill when engineers stopped calling the shots?
- i80and 3y ago
  I don't think there's a polite way to put this, but to be honest this comment is an excellent example of what the parent is talking about. All companies have needs that engineers tend to be very poor at, and if the engineers are dominant and see the other members of the organization as parasites, that's a serious dysfunction and not by any means "normal".
  - WindyLakeReturn 3y ago
    Is there anything really special happening here? For a non-technical individual, it can be hard to tell when someone technical is providing value and when they are, to use the term in this post chain, being a parasite. A technical person has the same issues with non-technical people. I've seen different non-technical business areas have this issue with other non-technical areas. I've read reports where supposedly entire departments were cut and the result was that they mostly parasites and the business did better after losing them, along with times such a decision killed a company. I'm not sure there is anything really special with engineers in this situation. It seems like one of many varieties of the same problem with telling who is producing value and who is faking the appearance of producing value.
    - sudosysgen 3y ago
      Ultimately, the people making those decisions need to be technical enough to know. Having those decisions made purely by non-technical people is playing russian roulette. This is something that is in many ways easier in more technical domains because at least it's possible to semi-reliably see through the bullshit.
- gonzo41 3y ago
  I work for a 'hard' engineering company. Hard in the sense it makes physical things and does physical things. They don't give a shit about software and any of the engineering around it. And I consider that a pretty good deal from working at a finance place where I was doing support dev work on their data warehouse. There they just saw me as an expensive cost center (I was probably not paid enough in retro) Anyway. Shoes on the other foot at SE. What surprises me about SE is that it has all these smart people and a big community but it has let google and the parasites scrape it to death.
- hattmall 3y ago
  Yeah and I think an issue is how engineers think vs other people. What maybe seen as rude or negative is just an engineer optimizing for efficiency or technical correctness. Other people then tend to take things personally and attach emotion to situations where they are having to be corrected. I have this play out repeatedly in my personal life. I've found I have to simply let people do the wrong things or fail a little bit and gently guide solutions. Otherwise there will be emotional pushback that entrenches their position.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    "Optimising for efficiency" on a personal/personnel/social level is one of the most common forms of rudeness in every day life. It generally _is_ rudeness.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
      Politeness, is of course, when you hate the other person so much that you waste their time with all the various social rituals.
    - Karunamon 3y ago
      Only when that appreciation for optimization is not shared between all participants. It is equally correct that someone who is not interested in social minutia is having their time wasted by having it inflicted on them, and this, too, is rude.
  - hooverd 3y ago
    > ...do the wrong things or fail a little bit and gently guide solutions That's getting someone to change their mind 101. Not an engineer exclusive insight. I think a lot of "oh engineers are so rational that's why people think we're so rude" is just post hoc rationalization for poor social skills.
- duxup 3y ago
  I don't know if it is normal or not, but it certainly shouldn't be.
thathndude 3y ago
As a non-engineer user, I know I have regularly felt unwelcome in various ways.
duxup 3y ago
Entitled "special" people are a problem everywhere. Dev's who are labeled as high performers get greenfield projects that can be pumped out quickly / look good ... someone else does the maintenance, they get all the flack for an obvious bug that wasn't fixed even if they didn't make it. The random executive who is thought to be highly successful who jumps from department to department spreading his fingerprint long enough to make an impact and leaves quickly enough to avoid any responsibility for the results. I fear it is a human thing and people are really good at sensing when they can get away with things.
- pbourke 3y ago
  As time goes on, I more and more have the feeling that maintenance is 95% of the value in any software system. A well-designed system at launch is not sufficient to provide sustained value, but competent ongoing maintenance is. Phrased another way, you can sustain value by maintaining a badly designed system but not by not maintaining a well-designed system. Ideally systems are well designed and well maintained but we don’t always have that luxury. Circling back to your point, it’s ironic that maintenance is the lowest-value activity in terms of big tech company reward systems.
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    Sometimes they can be well architected to a fault! I worked on a periphery of a big mainframe system that was designed and implemented before I was born. I think release 1 was in 1975. It still runs really well and is hard to displace because operationally, even though the people who understood it fully are retired or dead, they left behind strong materials so a moderately intelligent person can run everything. The “other” systems, old .Net, Java, etc that support the interfaces to the old app are hot garbage, and tend to steal the budget dollars that are needed to migrate off the 1970s stuff. My team had to fix one of these… argh.
  - duxup 3y ago
    When I worked tech support I got to know the "maintenance devs" pretty well. It was amazing how I'd end up on calls with the non-maintenance teams and they would insist X, Y, Z couldn't happen and no man ... maintenance devs knew it both could and was happening and would explain how and why. God bless those other non maintenance devs, they were good, but man they could take an RFC and turn it on its head sometimes.
robertlagrant 3y ago
> 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 anything but encouragement in feedback, and I advised him to filter feedback through me, his manager. Being "made to feel unwelcome" is both very real when you feel it, but looking slightly deeper it's not being made to feel unwelcome; it's feeling unwelcome. A mismatch of what's welcoming doesn't mean the person feeling unwelcome is correct; there may be no "correct" in that scenario. But it will be reported as though it is correct.
- at_a_remove 3y ago
  How would you have filtered feedback that is polite, thoughtful, and clear?
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Good question :-) You start by remembering that a lot of people have constant praise - they bought a new Thing™? "Well done you!" Say their friends. Or "You look sensational today!" Or whatever it is. Hyper-positive praise is very common, and any hint of anything else may well be jarring. Any improvement suggestions might need to either get thrown in the bin (even if they're valid and simple) or filtered through their manager, or have a guided conversation so they think they came up with it. It just depends on the person and your relationship with them, really.
    - at_a_remove 3y ago
      I guess what I am getting at is that, in this specific instance, I'm not sure there is anything to do. You either send it or not. It was polite, it was clear, and so on. Tonally, it was about as good as you can expect. So what is there to filter other than send/not-send?
chucksmash 3y ago
corecursive.com is your podcast?
- adamgordonbell 3y ago
  Yes! Please excuse the self plug. I find these culture issues interesting and didn't mean to highjack the thread.
deleted 3y ago
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duxup 3y ago

That was a really interesting. I do worry about the effect of sort of aggregating forces impact on places where content is created. We've seen it with news and etc already. Having said that with Stack Overflow the real reason I hit ChatGPT first in many cases is FRICTION. The UI, the users, the answers that are technically correct but "weird". It's a lot of filtering I have to do as a user that I don't do with ChatGPT or other AI tools.

JimtheCoder 3y ago
"the users..."weird"" I would have chosen another word for them...
digging 3y ago
I guess I'm just used to it now, but I kind of like the UI. It's easy to skim the page to find the part I'm looking for.
- fjfuvucucuc 3y ago
  [dead]
gostsamo 3y ago
You can generalize it to every market where the proxy owns the relationship with the client and captures the generated value. UI or whatever, if ChatGPT kills Stack Overflow, we will be in a situation where the shared knowledge will be at the level of 2021 and everything later will be with declining quality due to lack of data. I'd say that it is in OpenAI's interest to pay for SO and Redit so that they don't kill the hen with the golden eggs.
- valine 3y ago
  You’re assuming the bulk of ChatGPT’s coding knowledge comes from stack overflow. I suspect training directly on code bases and documentation is more important.
  - 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

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DrBazza 3y ago

ML works well, when it is only trained on correct data. ML trained on all the things ever written about programming is going to get things wrong quite a lot of the time, and you'll only have the context of its reply to you, for you to figure out whether the ML answer is correct. And of course, ML always wants to please you with an answer. SO, on the other hand has accepted answers, and upvoted answers that are easier to decide on whether they're correct (or what you're actually looking for). And there's more nuance to it as well.

kodra 3y ago
I found it interesting (and kinda worrisome) that some fine-tuned Llama 2 models are trained with GPT-4 generated data. So if GPT-4 got something wrong, the error would propagate to a lot open source models.
aCoreyJ 3y ago
ML you can actually give context and a very specific question but SO you have to search and hopefully find a similar enough question that has an answer that isn't extremely outdated
- hedora 3y ago
  You can give it context, and it will incorporate the context into the text of its response. Good luck figuring out if it incorporated the context in the content of the answer though. The internet already had too many low quality, misinformed pages. With Chat GPT, it now has an infinite number of pages like that. I’m not sure that makes a qualitative difference.
js8 3y ago
There is also regression to the mean. Human experts can sort out through advice and by reflecting on it, pick only the best. ChatGPT will give you, at best, average opinion. It won't help you get to the top, because the top is an outlier.
Someone 3y ago
> ML works well, when it is only trained on correct data. Is that correct? I would think that its ‘interpolation’ and ‘extrapolation’ capabilities can easily make it produce incorrect statements. As a simple example, train it on “π is a number”, “1 is a number”, “3/7 is a number”, “1.3457 is a number”, etc. and “1 is a rational number”, “3/7 is a rational number”, “1.3457 is a rational number”, etc. and I give you a good chance that it will ‘think’ “π is a rational number”.

discors 3y ago

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 questions that could have served answers are locked, deleted, and unfortunately, never asked due to the unpleasantness of dealing with the moderation. I speak for myself.

rejectfinite 3y ago
[flagged]
throwaway154 3y ago
Seconded.
duxup 3y ago
ChatGPT at least seems like it is trying to help me. The meta games going on in SO are a whole lot more of a mess and ChatGPT is more than happy to hear my question a 3rd time and spit out the same answer as before but change a few things. SO, not so much.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  I use chatgpt as a rubber duck who I’m suspicious of. Way too often it just comes up with fictional features
  - duxup 3y ago
    I get wrong answers too, but they're pretty easy to figure out fast and if I rephrase I get what I need. It's not like I'm not validating SO answers, there's not any extra steps from my SO experience. Also SO likes to give oddly, technically correct, but also hard to work with code sometimes to the point of being unusable and I take someone else's example anyway. ChatGPT is really good at making super generic answers and quick iterations / alterations. ChatGPT's power is often in the "conversation" where I add or take things away or change things "I need to break out X,Y,Z before I render it because..." and blamo I get new code. SO has none of that.

OliverJones 3y ago

I would really like to see what Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, the original creators of Stack Overflow, have to say about the current state of affairs. Their business model was recruiting by identifying people with specific skills, and it was effective. I hired and was hired that way. (They sold it years ago to a South African private equity venture and made the pile of money they deserved.)

kodra 3y ago
Someone should feed an LLM all the Joel on Software articles and ask it to comment on Stack Overflow. But a serious question: is Joel still in charge of SO? Has he retired?
- adamgordonbell 3y ago
  They sold it and in retrospect they really nailed the timing of the sale.
yankput 3y ago
I think it was not really making money the whole time they operated it though and the job finding angle wasn’t really making that much money, neither was the private enterprise SO thing

pythonbase 3y ago

To every rise, there's a fall. Wonder which platform is going to accommodate the know-it-alls of Stack Exchange. Reddit maybe.

dnissley 3y ago

The opening Google trends graph doesn't match the preceding claim about a material decline in usage at all... it says a lot more about the extraordinary rise of chatgpt (especially since most people aren't using chatgpt for programming questions). It feels like a "Facebook is dead" type of argument: popular but wrong.

kwstas 3y ago

I really don't buy it. There is considerably more interest in google trends for ChatGPT compared to StackOverflow. But I dont see one replacing the other. At least for me. I do not believe the google trend graphs,like "the scariest graph", in this post accurately reflect a decline of SO. There is a place for AI tools and StackOverflow is not the friendliest of places but the quality disparity between the answers you get when comparing the two is very clear to me. > This year, overall, we’re seeing an average of ~5% less traffic compared to 2022. Stack Overflow remains a trusted resource for millions of developers and technologists. [...] Conversely, in April of this year, we saw an above average traffic decrease (~14%), which we can likely attribute to developers trying GPT-4 after it was released in March. https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/08/08/insights-into-stack-overflows-traffic/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/08/08/insights-into-stack-ov...

jeroenvlek 3y ago
Agreed. ChatGPT might overtake StackOverflow, but that first graph does not suggest it, because StackOverflow itself remains constant, it doesn't decline in that graph.
dustincoates 3y ago
The Google Trends graph stuck out to me. You're comparing something that didn't exist before December and had broad appeal, to something that people arrive at generally by searching a question. They aren't at all comparable. (I imagine you'd see the same graph if you compared ChatGPT with Facebook. Doesn't mean ChatGPT is replacing social media.)

SamBorick 3y ago

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.

sitzkrieg 3y ago
same here
reidjs 3y ago
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.
- Ylpertnodi 3y ago
  >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).
valine 3y ago
For complex questions GPT4 works much better than 3.5.
LanceJones 3y ago
I'm a 56 year-old product marketer who used ChatGPT (plus Midjourney) to build an entire SaaS application and landing page: creatormail.io I've had some seasoned developers review my (ChatGPT's) Python and got positive feedback with some constructive suggestions.
- yankput 3y ago
  The avatar people on the front page have 3, 4 and 6 fingers so it checks out, it’s AI generated

laichzeit0 3y ago

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 <snippet of javascript code> Braindead stuff that I would normally lookup on StackOverflow but ChatGPT gives me the actual answer instead of me having to sift through comments. Also the last one is not something that's suited to StackOverflow. I feel I may be getting dumber, but also programming is not all that interesting to me that I would care to remember the details of any of these things.

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
[flagged]
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  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 renovations myself.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
    I concede that this is an entirely fair point, and one that I did not consider (mostly because we're on "Hacker News".
    - sanderjd 3y ago
      Ironically, I think this is more true of "Hacker News" than on other more programming-focused forums. I would describe the ethos here as "innovative problem-solving using computer technology". Whether that involves programming is totally beside the point. It has largely been the case since this site launched that most of the solutions do involve programming, but there's no reason they must. I think lots of non-programmer entrepreneur and product manager types hang out here, because of exactly this.

dweekly 3y ago

I should've been a great fit for stack exchange. I love technical communities and have been writing code for several decades. But they did not have a particularly welcoming experience for new contributors (perhaps by design?) so I wasn't ever really able to get the flywheel started and never ended up contributing much. I wonder if there's a systems lesson to be learned here around communities that do a good job welcoming new people and creating a magical onboarding experience staying vibrant for longer.

cole-k 3y ago
I don't think that the bad newcomer experience is by design. But I do think that it could be a lot better with a redesign. Here's how I've seen it played out before: --- johnnydoe2002 posts a question titled "How do I get my code to work?" with two sentences explaining their problem and an attached screenshot of their code. Within two minutes it gets downvoted thrice, flagged seven times as vague, and modman♦ closes the question, but not before posting the comment reply "Welcome to SO! Thank you for your interest, blah blah, your question has been closed because it needs clarification, blah blah, [link to new user portal]" OK maybe that was a bit hyperbolic and most new users aren't that bad, so let's say johnnydoe2002 is undeterred by this and actually formats and titles their question in a reasonable way. Within four minutes it has one short answer from repseeker and a long-form answer that is more of a code review from overeagerverbosity. The question gets no upvotes despite having two answers. Within seven minutes poweruser98 closes the question as duplicate because it received enough flags. If I were johnnydoe2002, I would have a mix of feelings. On the one hand, someone (two people, in fact!) answered my question; on the other hand, it was summarily closed and nobody found it interesting. I can clearly tell that I am not a part of the "in-group." But I can also commiserate with modman♦ and poweruser98. johnny's question only adds noise and they clearly didn't read the contribution guidelines. The mods and power users are willing to be nice, but they don't have the time to hold anyone's hand: in the past ten minutes they've had to deal with all sorts of questions from larryloe2001, minnymoe2003, and randyroe2000. I wouldn't be surprised if for every useful question on SO there are two that have to be closed. --- I honestly think that changes in phrasing and formatting could help the new user experience a lot. Like if instead of closing questions as duplicates, the mod/user in question would post an answer that says "I think this other thread answers your question" and the page is invisibly redirected everywhere else to the other thread. Essentially "shadow closing" so that it appears to the new user as if they just received immediate feedback in the form of a (helpful) answer, while not being told that they are bad because they dared post a duplicate. Or instead of closing a question as "needs clarification," sending it back to the edit modal with some adjoining commentary or links that explains the clarification it needs. I think that for a community with standards these exacting, most users will not be able to just pop in - which is difficult because we usually refer to SO in passing. But I also think that those exacting standards can be upheld without stomping over new users with downvotes and close votes.

j2kun 3y ago

This article does not really have any inside knowledge, nor much proof about decline. It is extrapolating and hypothesizing from graphs.

TheRealPomax 3y ago

Looking at that graph though, what it tells me is that stackoverflow was entirely unaffected by ChatGPT, and the giant spike is just humanity collectively jumping on ChatGPT in addition to folks using Stackoverflow in exactly the same way as before? Same for that "answers over time" graph: that's literally what you'd expect for a knowledge base. There has to be an initial trend upwards as the site starts to accumulate information (i.e. questions with answers, not just questions) and initially gains popularity as a place to get help by asking questions. But, as the number of questions and answers increases, the utility changes from a place to "get help by asking questions" to "a place to get help by searching for answers". At that point, the curve levels off, and as the number of typical beginner and intermediate questions die off because they've already been asked and answered many times, the number of new questions has to trend downward. It'll be slow, because we're constantly inventing new programming languages, libraries, frameworks, etc, but the majority of questions for those are simply duplicates of things asked about previous languages, libraries, and frameworks, with their answers being perfectly usable by folks looking for answers. And this is exactly the graph we see: rather than a sign of decline, it's a graph that shows the change from a predominantly Q&A site to predominantly being a knowledge repository. ChatGPT will, of course, have some impact on the graph, but the number of posts on Stackoverflow today that are "How do I X? I asked ChatGPT but that didn't help me" is staggering. ChatGPT may have initially driven down searches across the rest of the web, from Google to Stackoverflow to your mom's recipe website, but the novelty's already worn off, and overall it's done precious little to cut into the utility of Stackoverflow, as far as this data suggests.

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
This is a good point. With the infinite number of uses outside of programming, you wouldn’t expect to see SO interest correlate with GPT. And if it’s not negative that’s a win. SO has accessibility problems for beginners and a meta game for more advanced users. But there is no evidence of a death spiral here. If anything… GPT could help SO by relieving the massive number of basic questions that GPT actually can answer.
- TheRealPomax 3y ago

michaelbuckbee 3y ago

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 state of things that the inhuman AI is extending more grace than the human community.

idiotsecant 3y ago
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.
the_jeremy 3y ago
If you ask a bad question on SE (leave "bad" to be defined separately), you waste time of people who try to answer it, and of people who stumble across it hoping that it relates to them and solves their problem. If you ask a bad question to ChatGPT, you waste no one's time but your own. If answering SE was a job where you got paid, I would expect a lot more hand-holding (and some amount of kindness, to keep the revenue stream coming back), but instead, the people who answer questions do it more-or-less for fun. Having someone waste your time isn't fun.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  In those cases it's easy enough to just move on to another question rather than shut down the discussion. It's not like anyone's being forced to answer.
  - the_jeremy 3y ago
    But as an answerer, you will empathize more with the other answerers than the askers. You don't want the other answerers to also waste their time on this question, so you close it / downvote / mark it as duplicate.

cornholio 3y ago

I wouldn't exaggerate the death of Stack Exchange, it seems like they have a nice moat and are well positioned to change the future licensing terms of its answers and forbid using them for training AI. They have already banned machine generated content. When the question of training legality will be settled in courts - predictably, not to the advantage of the AI companies - Stack Exchange will be left with the human network generating the content, while AI companies will need to license any new answers it they don't want their models to remain stale and out of date.

kodra 3y ago

The title: Inside the Decline of Stack Exchange The content: A random guy looked at Google trend charts and fabricated some conclusions. The opposite of "inside".

no_time 3y ago

to me it looks like its too early to draw conclusions from the programming question volume graph. But if it is indeed true that LLMs are leaving SO in the dust, thats crazy. I’m in my 20’s and this is the first time I feel like my work routine and ways of interacting with tech is getting antiquated. God damn.

sarthak-ag 3y ago

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.

karaterobot 3y ago
Who shows contempt for SO? I don't see much of that, personally. Whenever it goes down, I see a lot of jokes about how nobody can do their job. The linked article agrees with you that it's "one of the greatest compendia of human knowledge ever produced".
birdstheword5 3y ago
You're right. But I think it can really vary based on which community you ask in. I think most people dislike how hostile the main stack overflow site is to beginners, who despite being the ones who need the most help, are the most likely to get their question closed/ downvoted. It's unfortunately necessary to maintain the high quality of the site.
- tivert 3y ago

tomrod 3y ago

I've found contributing questions or answers to SE/SO to be a lot of like hanging out in IRC channels dedicated to C -- a lot of blowhards tend to hang around the watering hole, berating people for lack of knowledge for some reason or another, expressing it in a variety of in-group approved ways. It becomes tiresome to wade through the self-important moderation to get to actual content. That said, spam and unmoderated channels are clearly worse too. I'm not sure how to get to something in the middle of that Laffer curve.

jaredchung 3y ago

If we believed ChatGPT was the cause of an SO decline, then I'd expect it to also cause a decline in Google searches for programming queries. Here's the Google Trends data for two super-common error codes and one more conceptual programming search query: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=TypeError,ValueError,react%20architecture&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=... Maybe a little something going on with typeerror? Or just noise. But it definitely doesn't look to me like evidence supporting the article's claim.

JasonPunyon 3y ago

I mean fine, write an article that overweights recent events to weave a tale of the decline of Stack Exchange...but don't leave out the moderator strike, the data dump fiasco, or the CEO that simply doesn't get it. Jon Ericson's writing on the issue is much more informative. https://jlericson.com/ https://jlericson.com/

AdamH12113 3y ago

This is a bit pedantic, but there is a difference between: 1. Stack Exchange, a network of Q&A sites built around a single model 2. Stack Overflow, a specific Q&A site for questions about programming, on which that network was founded Programming- and computing-related SE sites are the most popular, but they are not the only ones. ChatGPT cannot read a circuit schematic, should not be used for legal questions, probably won't recognize an obscure science fiction book based on one plot element you hazily remember, and in general is not a reliable expert in anything. I say this is pedantic because if the programming sites "decline" they'll probably take the rest of the network with them, but as a long time denizen of EE.SE I would like if it people at least recognized that SE is used for more interesting things than "how do I do [basic programming task X]?".

Sparkyte 3y ago

I forsee any social media driven board including that of tech to have an eventual decline. As that is the way of technology, something newer and more relevent of the masses that utilize arise.

hobs 3y ago

One thing that's interesting to me about the consistent complaints about moderators is that SO moderators are elected and only really held accountable by other moderators. I almost was a moderator for one of the SO sister sites, but I thought it was just too much thankless work, and I can understand why it yields petulant people who would rather see less content that conforms to their expectations than to create and make space for new ways of doing things. The content itself is an attractant to people like that, once you have an established corpus to corral you perceive ownership and want to "protect" it. I genuinely don't know if there's any way to fix what I see as inherent problems in online communities, that generate "open source" knowledge at least.

shadowgovt 3y ago

Author seems to be doing a lot of reasoning from a hockey-stick graph that's less than a year old. I'd give it time to see if that line keeps trending upward or the line crashes (as hype gives way to "Wait this tool is unreliable", which it may).

1letterunixname 3y ago

It follows the arc of most things including Quora and somewhat generally other popular ventures like Snap, Facebook, MySpace, AOL/AIM, and CompuServe. The initial Cambrian explosion slowly changes from cool obscurity to hype as time goes on and the shine fades. There's also a supply and demand problem of double-ended Q&A sites: there's rarely direct incentives to give away subject matter expertise. There are indirect incentives such as reputation, but behind nicknames, this doesn't necessarily translate into industry reputation. Furthermore, there are potential human language and subject matter terminology difficulties of throwing geographically-, and industry-diverse groups of users together. The platform should attempt to ameliorate language differences and steer user-contributed content away from devolving into ego battles, bikeshedding, nitpicking, or handwaving.