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The linked site seems overloaded (it’s popular on Reddit right now) - is it the same article as this one? https://en.numere.org/home/blog/the-fall-of-stackoverf

The linked site seems overloaded (it’s popular on Reddit right now) - is it the same article as this one? https://en.numere.org/home/blog/the-fall-of-stackoverflow https://en.numere.org/home/blog/the-fall-of-stackoverflow …if so, it was published a year ago: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/erik-h%C3%A4nel-6a44151a6_numere-the-fall-of-stackoverflow-activity-7096759154903498752-Uqsx https://www.linkedin.com/posts/erik-h%C3%A4nel-6a44151a6_num... *EDIT:* The linked site (with an ironic… or apt domain-name) finally loaded for me - it is a different article. Interesting to compare conclusions though: 2023 article: > In summary, it appears that the biggest contributor to "StackOverflow's fall" is not one of the two LLMs GPT3 or GPT4, but rather the market power of Google's algorithm. The latter's changes in May 2022 caused a significant drop in traffic that is much more significant than the effect of GPT. However, since traffic also provides advertising revenue, this can be a big problem in the future. […] Of course, this also reflects the previous analysis: most of the generally valid questions have already been answered (and their answers can also be generated by GPT). What remains are the few questions that are very specific. 2024 article: > StackOverflow's decline was a result of issues within its model and execution, which predated ChatGPT's introduction. While ChatGPT may have accelerated this decline, it was not the sole cause. There are likely many factors contributing to StackOverflow's struggles, but AI alone cannot account for the entirety of its challenges. They both kinda agree - if you squint a bit.

byteface 2y ago
You're right. For me personally, Discord was killing Stackoverflow about a year earlier. Waiting a week for a reply on Stackoverflow was becoming dull while discord live chat rooms were buzzing with instant feedback. Even as copilot first arrived it wasn't a scratch on asking an room of professionals at realtime. But now chatGPT has become a bit more fledged you can see why it would dent other platforms. I've often thought about this as how would you train future bots if all we do is talk with them now?. Where will they read their answers?
- DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
  Whenever I go on Discord the chats are so busy my message flies up off the screen in seconds - how does it work for you?
  - byteface 2y ago
    To be fair I haven't used it for about a year. As I recall I joined about 40 rooms though and not all were busy. But I think in general if your question is esoteric you would have to peel of into a room with someone with the domain specific knowledge. Some problems require a wordy description of the problem and that wont fly well in a live chat. I was really just after verification that my solution was optimal. But sometimes there just isn't a better way.
    - nottorp 2y ago
      Holy $DEITY. Discord is a -ing chat platform. They haven't fixed anything for you. The various communities that run their own discord based chats may or may not have fixed things for you.
- frereubu 2y ago
  I haven't used Discord, but isn't the issue there that the answer gets quickly buried? It might work well for one person getting an answer, but the huge value of SO is that the answers stick around and turn up pretty well in searches.
  - dspillett 2y ago
    > I haven't used Discord, but isn't the issue there that the answer gets quickly buried? Yes. This is one of the key reasons behind creating SO and why it worked so well at first. As well as non-current content in some sources getting buried or otherwise being hard to find, or simply expiring (individual forums going offline), the other issue was the distribution of people willing+able to answer questions around the many disparate forums was inefficient – for all the talk of “the Internet should be as decentralised as possible” no one has found a better answer for this than a bit of centralisation with open licensing (SO wouldn't have attracted as many of the better people answering if their work was going to be locked in rather than covered by something like CC-BY-SA). The solution that is taking over a bit ATM is Chatty Glorified Predictive Text and its friends, because this gets around the latency issues (you get a much faster answer, even if an incorrect one that means you need to rephrase the question several times) and licensing issues (though IMO the morality of that is rather dubious, the legality of it is still being argued in a number of places, but nether question of legality nor morality is going to stop it happening going forward).
jl6 2y ago
> most of the generally valid questions have already been answered My experience was that SO excelled at answering basic questions with definitive answers, but anything creeping outside that sweet spot would be poorly understood by both answerers and moderators. It’s still a useful resource for that historical record of basic answers, but it feels like complex, niche or subtle questions are not welcome.
- seb1204 2y ago
  So where to go with such questions? I have one that I am not sure if it is a bug, a user issue or an android issue or a phone/hardware issue.
  - vintagedave 2y ago
    Exactly! I don't know where to go either. Once upon a time, SO was the place, but they stopped that with site policy changes around 2012 or so. A lot more became off-topic, and I found that the value I got from it declined right from that time. The view count sharply dropping off around 2013 mirrors (to me) the increasingly more narrowly defined scope of the site's acceptable content than what it was when it started.
    - CannisterFlux 2y ago
      I went back and checked my SO account history. I stopped posting answers regularly at the end of 2011. I can't remember now what drama caused me to stop, but in 2011 I was posting 2-3 answers per day, then in 2012 I didn't post anything until mid-year, then about a post or two per year, and my last post was over 6 years ago. Digging through my local notes and journals as to why I stopped, I have an unpublished draft blog post from 2012 that has some examples of bad questions from 2012, and I later added https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252506 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252506 to it as something that resonated with me - "Why did I even help this guy? I have just been wasting my time". I must have been burned out on the whole thing by that point, but it was 10+ years ago and I've not even visited SO in years. I do remember they added a tier of moderation around this time, and I had sufficient points to have access to that. Every time I visited the site it showed a red dot on the stuff-to-do icon, encouraging me to review a queue of bad questions. I'm pretty sure that was when I decided to stop contributing, because the site felt like it was more focused on the tedious bureaucracy of it all than the technical stuff.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

byteface 2y ago

You're right. For me personally, Discord was killing Stackoverflow about a year earlier. Waiting a week for a reply on Stackoverflow was becoming dull while discord live chat rooms were buzzing with instant feedback. Even as copilot first arrived it wasn't a scratch on asking an room of professionals at realtime. But now chatGPT has become a bit more fledged you can see why it would dent other platforms. I've often thought about this as how would you train future bots if all we do is talk with them now?. Where will they read their answers?

DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
Whenever I go on Discord the chats are so busy my message flies up off the screen in seconds - how does it work for you?
- byteface 2y ago
  To be fair I haven't used it for about a year. As I recall I joined about 40 rooms though and not all were busy. But I think in general if your question is esoteric you would have to peel of into a room with someone with the domain specific knowledge. Some problems require a wordy description of the problem and that wont fly well in a live chat. I was really just after verification that my solution was optimal. But sometimes there just isn't a better way.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    Holy $DEITY. Discord is a -ing chat platform. They haven't fixed anything for you. The various communities that run their own discord based chats may or may not have fixed things for you.
frereubu 2y ago
I haven't used Discord, but isn't the issue there that the answer gets quickly buried? It might work well for one person getting an answer, but the huge value of SO is that the answers stick around and turn up pretty well in searches.
- dspillett 2y ago
  > I haven't used Discord, but isn't the issue there that the answer gets quickly buried? Yes. This is one of the key reasons behind creating SO and why it worked so well at first. As well as non-current content in some sources getting buried or otherwise being hard to find, or simply expiring (individual forums going offline), the other issue was the distribution of people willing+able to answer questions around the many disparate forums was inefficient – for all the talk of “the Internet should be as decentralised as possible” no one has found a better answer for this than a bit of centralisation with open licensing (SO wouldn't have attracted as many of the better people answering if their work was going to be locked in rather than covered by something like CC-BY-SA). The solution that is taking over a bit ATM is Chatty Glorified Predictive Text and its friends, because this gets around the latency issues (you get a much faster answer, even if an incorrect one that means you need to rephrase the question several times) and licensing issues (though IMO the morality of that is rather dubious, the legality of it is still being argued in a number of places, but nether question of legality nor morality is going to stop it happening going forward).

jl6 2y ago

> most of the generally valid questions have already been answered My experience was that SO excelled at answering basic questions with definitive answers, but anything creeping outside that sweet spot would be poorly understood by both answerers and moderators. It’s still a useful resource for that historical record of basic answers, but it feels like complex, niche or subtle questions are not welcome.

seb1204 2y ago
So where to go with such questions? I have one that I am not sure if it is a bug, a user issue or an android issue or a phone/hardware issue.
- vintagedave 2y ago
  Exactly! I don't know where to go either. Once upon a time, SO was the place, but they stopped that with site policy changes around 2012 or so. A lot more became off-topic, and I found that the value I got from it declined right from that time. The view count sharply dropping off around 2013 mirrors (to me) the increasingly more narrowly defined scope of the site's acceptable content than what it was when it started.
  - CannisterFlux 2y ago
    I went back and checked my SO account history. I stopped posting answers regularly at the end of 2011. I can't remember now what drama caused me to stop, but in 2011 I was posting 2-3 answers per day, then in 2012 I didn't post anything until mid-year, then about a post or two per year, and my last post was over 6 years ago. Digging through my local notes and journals as to why I stopped, I have an unpublished draft blog post from 2012 that has some examples of bad questions from 2012, and I later added https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252506 https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/252506 to it as something that resonated with me - "Why did I even help this guy? I have just been wasting my time". I must have been burned out on the whole thing by that point, but it was 10+ years ago and I've not even visited SO in years. I do remember they added a tier of moderation around this time, and I had sufficient points to have access to that. Every time I visited the site it showed a red dot on the stuff-to-do icon, encouraging me to review a queue of bad questions. I'm pretty sure that was when I decided to stop contributing, because the site felt like it was more focused on the tedious bureaucracy of it all than the technical stuff.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]