4 ms·

I'm surprised at how non-obvious LLMs are for that decline chart. SO peaking in 2014 is not what I would have expected.

ronbenton 9mo ago
Me too. It does appear a bit more dramatic around when LLMs hit the scene but the was already a clear peak/decline starting well before.
- JohnFen 9mo ago
  Yeah, I think I gave up on SO myself right around then. Maybe a little earlier. The combination of decreasing usefulness and increasing unpleasantness made it easy to walk away.
  - ronbenton 9mo ago
    I know I always asked far fewer questions than I wanted to there for fear of being chastised. Maybe that's what the community wanted?
spelk 9mo ago
It may just feel that way because we're less likely to look at SO directly now that there are better alternatives.
canjobear 9mo ago
The chart is questions posted. Almost all my SO usage was looking at answers already posted. I only posted questions when I couldn’t find anything. I wonder if the pre-2023 decline is just because more and more of the questions people had were already covered.
throwway120385 9mo ago
I'm not. A lot of moderators on SO thought that technology stayed the same from 2014 onward. So I'd often see questions that were exactly the same as the one I asked, but they'd be closed as a duplicate of a question that was subtly different in wording but totally different in technical content. And you would have had to be intimately aware of the systems the question was about to recognize the difference. Most of the moderators doing that did not know enough to be moderating. And so SO became a place where obsolete solutions got cemented in time and where once a question was answered somehow nobody ever tried to answer it again.
- foobarian 9mo ago
  Seems like the LLM training problem but just manifesting in humans. Actually wonder if replacing all the moderators with LLM would be an improvement.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 9mo ago
    >Seems like the LLM training problem but just manifesting in humans. There are people at the periphery of my life that I suspect are little more than biological LLMs. Their drivel has much in common with AI slop. I'm sure some of you have had similar experiences. >Actually wonder if replacing all the moderators with LLM would be an improvement. This might be like putting Skynet in charge of traffic court penalties.
- ourmandave 9mo ago
  That's what's odd to me. When you're composing a question it will dynamically show links to related answers. So the author has already seen possible duplicates, right? Yet them seem quick to play the Closed for Duplicate card. The other thing is it will say, "New Contributor, be nice." and their question will have -5 or more downvotes. I think that's because the auto closer needed -5 to trigger or something. I could be wrong. Either way, to a newbie it just looks like they're piling on hate for no reason.
  - zahlman 9mo ago
    > When you're composing a question it will dynamically show links to related answers. So the author has already seen possible duplicates, right? Okay, presumably you're familiar with the experience of seeing these links. When you saw them, how much effort did you put into opening them in new tabs and checking whether they answer your question? I'm guessing, not a lot. The UI affordance isn't great. The semantic search is just not very good (and it has to filter through massive piles of dreck) and it constantly updates; it shows you answer counts and doesn't try to sort or filter what it shows you for quality; but most importantly someone writing a question isn't expecting it, and checking it breaks the flow of drafting the question. > Yet them seem quick to play the Closed for Duplicate card. My experience has been that the very large majority of these closures are correct, and the large majority of closures complained about on the meta site are very obviously correct and the objections often boil down to trivialities and/or a general opposition to the idea of closing duplicates at all (without attempting to understand the reasons for doing so). > The other thing is it will say, "New Contributor, be nice." and their question will have -5 or more downvotes. I think that's because the auto closer needed -5 to trigger or something. I could be wrong. Either way, to a newbie it just looks like they're piling on hate for no reason. No. It's because the downvotes are for quality rating and are explicitly not intended as a rebuke to the OP, regardless of account age or reputation. Also because they affect sort order; because non-duplicates can't be immediately closed, people who want the question closed (note: the explicit, sole purpose of closing a question is to prevent it from receiving new answers) have a vested interest in hiding it from the sort of users who try to answer everything without heed to quality or suitability.
zahlman 9mo ago
There was already tension in, like, 2011 or 2012. If you check the meta site there's a huge volume of posts from 2014, including probably the majority of the "classics" that experienced curators trot out to try and explain policy to people. A lot of the time I think about how something has been a problem for years, and I search on the meta site for previous discussion, and find someone from 2014 saying that it had already been a problem for a while.

Me too. It does appear a bit more dramatic around when LLMs hit the scene but the was already a clear peak/decline starting well before.

JohnFen 9mo ago
Yeah, I think I gave up on SO myself right around then. Maybe a little earlier. The combination of decreasing usefulness and increasing unpleasantness made it easy to walk away.
- ronbenton 9mo ago
  I know I always asked far fewer questions than I wanted to there for fear of being chastised. Maybe that's what the community wanted?

spelk 9mo ago

It may just feel that way because we're less likely to look at SO directly now that there are better alternatives.

canjobear 9mo ago

The chart is questions posted. Almost all my SO usage was looking at answers already posted. I only posted questions when I couldn’t find anything. I wonder if the pre-2023 decline is just because more and more of the questions people had were already covered.

throwway120385 9mo ago

I'm not. A lot of moderators on SO thought that technology stayed the same from 2014 onward. So I'd often see questions that were exactly the same as the one I asked, but they'd be closed as a duplicate of a question that was subtly different in wording but totally different in technical content. And you would have had to be intimately aware of the systems the question was about to recognize the difference. Most of the moderators doing that did not know enough to be moderating. And so SO became a place where obsolete solutions got cemented in time and where once a question was answered somehow nobody ever tried to answer it again.

foobarian 9mo ago
Seems like the LLM training problem but just manifesting in humans. Actually wonder if replacing all the moderators with LLM would be an improvement.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 9mo ago
  >Seems like the LLM training problem but just manifesting in humans. There are people at the periphery of my life that I suspect are little more than biological LLMs. Their drivel has much in common with AI slop. I'm sure some of you have had similar experiences. >Actually wonder if replacing all the moderators with LLM would be an improvement. This might be like putting Skynet in charge of traffic court penalties.
ourmandave 9mo ago
That's what's odd to me. When you're composing a question it will dynamically show links to related answers. So the author has already seen possible duplicates, right? Yet them seem quick to play the Closed for Duplicate card. The other thing is it will say, "New Contributor, be nice." and their question will have -5 or more downvotes. I think that's because the auto closer needed -5 to trigger or something. I could be wrong. Either way, to a newbie it just looks like they're piling on hate for no reason.
- zahlman 9mo ago
  > When you're composing a question it will dynamically show links to related answers. So the author has already seen possible duplicates, right? Okay, presumably you're familiar with the experience of seeing these links. When you saw them, how much effort did you put into opening them in new tabs and checking whether they answer your question? I'm guessing, not a lot. The UI affordance isn't great. The semantic search is just not very good (and it has to filter through massive piles of dreck) and it constantly updates; it shows you answer counts and doesn't try to sort or filter what it shows you for quality; but most importantly someone writing a question isn't expecting it, and checking it breaks the flow of drafting the question. > Yet them seem quick to play the Closed for Duplicate card. My experience has been that the very large majority of these closures are correct, and the large majority of closures complained about on the meta site are very obviously correct and the objections often boil down to trivialities and/or a general opposition to the idea of closing duplicates at all (without attempting to understand the reasons for doing so). > The other thing is it will say, "New Contributor, be nice." and their question will have -5 or more downvotes. I think that's because the auto closer needed -5 to trigger or something. I could be wrong. Either way, to a newbie it just looks like they're piling on hate for no reason. No. It's because the downvotes are for quality rating and are explicitly not intended as a rebuke to the OP, regardless of account age or reputation. Also because they affect sort order; because non-duplicates can't be immediately closed, people who want the question closed (note: the explicit, sole purpose of closing a question is to prevent it from receiving new answers) have a vested interest in hiding it from the sort of users who try to answer everything without heed to quality or suitability.

zahlman 9mo ago

There was already tension in, like, 2011 or 2012. If you check the meta site there's a huge volume of posts from 2014, including probably the majority of the "classics" that experienced curators trot out to try and explain policy to people. A lot of the time I think about how something has been a problem for years, and I search on the meta site for previous discussion, and find someone from 2014 saying that it had already been a problem for a while.