Stack Overflow has seen a substantial decline in traffic over the last year that appears to be accelerating. https://observablehq.com/@ayhanfuat/the-fall-of-stack-overflow
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Probably questions that can be answered by RTFM
LLM has RATFM and you can ask it directly
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Ah, the prime example of a stack overflow user. Nice.
The prime example of a SO user is being intentionally obtuse, demanding more detail even if the typical programmer would have a pretty clear picture of what is being asked. So yeah, projection much?
And then asking, “why would you even try doing it like this?”
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That’s fair.
I’m trying to SSH into my Window 11 machine and it keeps saying “Connection refused: port 22”. Wut do?
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Oh, thank you. Your use of reduplication helped my smooth brain process your comment properly.
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Code is something used by the Germans to defeat the Allies, they put code in their tanks and drove all the way to London to greet the English prime minister with a barrage of advanced warfare and AI-enabled crypto currencies.
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This is my favorite comment on lemmy so far
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https://stackoverflow.com/tour
With your help, we’re working together to build a library of detailed, high-quality answers to every question about programming.
There’s a call out to quality of answers… which has implications for the quality of the questions.
Focus on questions about an actual problem you have faced. Include details about what you have tried and exactly what you are trying to do.
Make note of the use “exactly what you are trying to do”. When people are asking about what are you trying to do and the nature of the question… that’s part of it.
Not all questions work well in our format. Avoid questions that are primarily opinion-based, or that are likely to generate discussion rather than answers.
Not everything is suited for the Q&A format that Stack Overflow uses. It isn’t a help desk - it’s a Q&A site that is trying to build a repository of information.
Further reading: https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/06/13/optimizing-for-pearls-not-sand/
In March 2010, we rebalanced our reputation system to favor answers. While we value good questions (and asking a great question is absolutely an art), we want to explicitly encourage people to provide the best possible answers. Without people interested in providing good answers, the questions are moot. We know that answers have more intrinsic…
…
That’s why we’re determined to keep question quality high, even at the cost of refusing a little sand. It’s true that you can’t have Q&A; without questions, but having the wrong sorts of questions is far more dangerous. The fastest way to kill any Q&A; site is to flood it with low-quality questions. I think Mark Trapp summed it up best in this meta answer:
And an announcement of Stack Overflow: https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/
It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
The emphasis on “good” is in the original too.
It may be that your question isn’t one that fits the site format well. That should be ok - there are many other places to ask questions. Stack Overflow is poorly designed for many types of questions in an effort to optimize its utility for being a repository of knowledge for people to search and find answers without having to ever ask a question.
Is there a fediverse alternative yet?
Also, if you are a technical person I urge you to start a blog where you document problems you solve. It’s a great ressource for others and a resumé for you.
There is not yet a good story for federation and the Q&A format… or at least I’m not aware of one.
The difficulty is making sure that it’s moderated with sufficient controls… but then that starts running counter to the ideals of people on the fediverse. But without moderation, you get things that are Quara, and Yahoo Answers… and worse.
The corresponding part is that much of the utility of Q&A is making sure that it has good SEO so that you don’t need to answer the same question again.
All these things tend to suggest that a centralized Q&A system would work better. It’s not that you can’t federate it - but there are a lot of other hard problems for federation of Q&A that are much harder to solve.
Alternatively, what about [email protected] doesn’t fit the desired functionality of Q&A?
It’s almost as if devs have found a new way to have their code written for them… 😅
This tracks with my own experience of relying more on ChatGPT for coding assistance rather than searching Google (which would then lead to me to StackOverflow). ChatGPT has just been a faster way to get to the answer I’m looking for. StackOverflow is still a fantastic resource, though.
I think this has as much to do with Google being shit at finding stuff lately as it does llms like chatGPT
You can even see the decline in posts and votes before GPT became mainstream. This definitely look more like search engine failing to get rid of those cheap copycats.
Wait, what? On Google??
On Google and on Duck Duck Go too. On DDG you can’t get rid of the over-optimized websites anymore even if you use -“website name”. Luckily -site:address still works.
That’s crazy. Google/DDG bloat from SEO websites had already driven me out a while ago, so I hadn’t noticed. I’ve been using Kagi for a few months now, and I find I can trust my search results again. Being able to permanently downgrade or even block a given website is an awesome feature, I would recommend it just for that.
Wait WHAT? I was just asking on discord the other day if there existed a search engine that allowed you to blacklist websites as a user setting. I need to curate out all AI written garbage from my results.
Hmm, not really used to the idea of paying for search, but I understand.
Is it good at filtering AI generated sites and sites that are clearly copy pasted. Or do you kind of have to identify that yourself and manually block?
I think it’s worth testing it with the free 100 searches. All you need is an email address (no credit card unless you’re actually subscribing). I’ve only been using it a few days but I don’t think it filters out AI generated sites. But you can set a ranking by site (block, lower, normal, raise, pin) so you can make stack overflow be priorised and block quora.
They have a ranking board of top sites in each category so you can go through it and set the rank of a bunch of sites upfront.
Thanks
There’s no specific AI detection at the moment, as far as I can tell. But it has “listicle” detection. If you ask “best lawn mower”, all these “the 5 best lawn mowers of 2023” websites with affiliated Amazon links get pooled into a compact Listicle section, that you can just scroll past and ignore.
Agreed. For me, making it so that the search engine ignores -string was one of the biggest set backs.
the search engine ignores -string
WHAT? Why would they do that? WTF no wonder…
Hyphen (-) means you don’t want to see this word, while words surrounded by quotes (") means you want these phrases exactly.
Most symbols are also ignored, which is great for an average user but terrible for programmers.
Yeh, suddenly you need to know what the language calls the operator within the context you want to use it.
At which point, you probably don’t need to Google the symbol!
I’m still pissed over removing +words. Like, G+ is gone, guys, so revert that mess.
It was a really dumb move but you can can still get the same effect by putting a word in quotation marks.
UI-wise, though, it’s toxic, and therefore slower and more stressing. It’s something that can be fixed, and ergo essentially a bug. ;-)
I used to spend a lot of time on Google and stack, now I ask phind more often than not, which violates information for me.
Don’t forget that Duck Duck Go is even worse at it now. It will literally change your results if you go back after clicking a link.
Why is that?
I think they’re trying to implement a sort of “smart prediction” thing, where it assumes that if you go back the link you clicked wasn’t relevant. And so it tries to remove closely related results. Which works the opposite if you get two results from the same page and you click the wrong one. Which makes looking up technical or programming related issues a nightmare.
Most of the comments here seem to be arguing whether it’s better to get help now from SO or ChatGPT, but this is a pretty short-sighted mindset.
What happens when the next new standard comes out that ChatGPT hasn’t been trained on? If SO tanks and dies, where will you go?
I’m not saying use a lesser resource, I’m saying this is kinda tragic and I hope they can sustain themselves; AI is propped up by human input and can’t train itself.
Hey, if people are going to go back to reading manuals like we’re in the 1980’s again is it such a bad thing? /s
It’s insane how a single tool managed to completely destroy the value collectively created by people in over a decade.
That single tool is still propped up by that collective decade of knowledge. ChatGPT would be nothing without sites like stackoverflow
Yeah but will people still care about contributing that information if they’re not going to be compensated for it in any way? Like people get something out of contributing to stack overflow, even if it’s just recognition. This is gone with ChatGPT.
Isn’t that the FOSS model since ever?
With the FOSS model you get credited at least, so you are getting something out of it even if it’s not monetary. With ChatGPT you don’t even get that. You’re feeding an AI that’s being monetized by someone else, what possible incentive could people have to contribute anymore?
Not everyone is motivated by money and recognition, are you aware of that? Since humans were humans, cooperation has been an integral part of society and still is today.
Some people will always try to monetize everything, but still, people continue to develop FOSS.
ChatGPT will be no different in that regard.
When a single entity reaps all of the rewards of that cooperation, people are much less motivated to do that.
Some people are politically motivated, there are tons of reasons, but it’s a two way interaction in all of these cases.
Crazy idea, what about a “federated” search. Hook up the websites’ internal search engines to an aggregator. Stop allowing random indexing spiders to scrape.
Does it really though? It seems to me that once you nail the general intelligence, you’ll just need to provide the supplemental information (e.g. new documentations) for it to give an accurate response.
Bing already somewhat does this by connecting their bot to internet searches
It seems to me that once you nail the general intelligence
That’s not happening anytime soon.
What if the documentation is lacking? Experienced users will still know how a library works because they’ve tried some things, but that information won’t be available if they never talk about it online
how do people still have this much faith in the tools humans build after seeing the climate change caused by the industrial revolution.
We’re not able to properly define general intelligence, let alone build something that qualifies as intelligent.
I can think of four aspects needed to emulate human response: basic knowledge on various topics, logical reasoning, contextual memory, and ability to communicate; and ChatGPT seems to possess all four to a certain degree.
Regardless of what you think is or isn’t intelligent, for programming help you just need something to go through tons of text and present the information most likely to help you, maybe modify it a little to fit your context. That doesn’t sound too far fetched considering what we have today and how much information are available on the internet
I can think of four aspects needed to emulate human response: basic knowledge on various topics, logical reasoning, contextual memory, and ability to communicate; and ChatGPT seems to possess all four to a certain degree.
LLM’s cannot reason, nor can they communicate. They can give the illusion of doing so, and that’s if they have enough data in the domain you’re prompting them with. Try to go into topics that aren’t as popular on the internet, the illusion breaks down pretty quickly. This isn’t “we’re not there yet”, it’s a fundamental limitation of the technology. LLM’s are designed to mimick the style of a human response, they don’t have any logical capabilities.
Regardless of what you think is or isn’t intelligent, for programming help you just need something to go through tons of text and present the information most likely to help you, maybe modify it a little to fit your context. That doesn’t sound too far fetched considering what we have today and how much information are available on the internet.
You’re the one who brought up general intelligence not me, but to respond to your point: The problem is that people had an incentive to contribute that text, and it wasn’t necessarily monetary. Whether it was for internet points or just building a reputation, people got something in return for their time. With LLM’s, that incentive is gone, because no matter what they contribute it’s going to be fed to a model that won’t attribute those contributions back to them.
Today LLM’s are impressive because they use information that was contributed by millions of people. The more people rely on ChatGPT, the less information will be available to train it on, and the less impressive these models are going to be over time.
I was working on a hobby project where I used a niche framework in a somewhat uncommon way. I was stuck on a concept that I think the documentation didn’t explain well enough, at least for me, and I couldn’t find any resource on it aside from the docs.
I asked Bing to write a piece of code that does what I wanted and explain each line. It was perfectly working and the explanation was also understandable. All it did was search for its official documentation. It really blew my mind.
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very good point! I find myself using ChatGPT more for references and I am also afraid what will happen if there isn’t enough “human generated content” to train on. I can picture an edge case a chunk of the internet is AI generated content (with even users at the wheel). The the next wave of AI will train on previous gen AI output
AI should be trained by itself though. I just wouldn’t call LLMs “AI” as a term
Also, it shall be possible in the future to just feed it the documentation and have answers. Obviously we are still nowhere near yet
We go back to expertsexchange
We will go to the documentation.
Oh god, oh no.
Do you realize what that will mean? My coworkers will have to learn how to understand documentation standards that rely on anything but “self documenting code.”
I am already “an expert (lol @ my salary)” because I read shit they don’t bother looking up. We’re truly doomed.
That’s a pipe dream thinking all the documentation is complete and well detailed
I can’t count the times where I read the documentation for the tutorial to get started and the steps described in the official documentation by the official maintainer fails early.
Documentation is 99% an afterthought (slight exaggeration here)
All questions have obviously been answered.
Not arguing with the other possible reasons given, but it can be really hard to get started with SO as anything other than a reader. Gaining enough points to comment, answer, or even answer a comment feels really hard now that so many questions are already answered well.
It doesn’t look to be a decline at all (quite healthy on the contrary) until around the time ChatGPT was released.
quite healthy
Right…
Maybe I would post more if I didn’t get ignored, or my questions immediately get marked to be closed without comment.
I’ve had an account for almost 10 years that I use at least every other day at work, and have seen plenty of questions I CAN answer but apparently don’t have the “reputation” to.
Honestly a really dumb system imo.
Man, infuriating! I had a problem that was being asked on stackoverflow but with no solution. Later, I found the solution reading some obscure parts of the docs from certain vendor. I was gonna post it there so everyone that had the same problem could find it and solve it. But I don’t have enough reputation :/
Never got into it because of that.
Nobody OWES me an answer, but if I tend not to get one, I’m not going to keep bothering with SO.
Now, the anonymous cowards who mark a question to be closed without commenting are a different story.
It might not be much of a loss. The average quality of answers there has been below mediocre for as long as I can remember.
Lots of people eager to earn points by showing off what they think they know, relatively few who truly understand the nontrivial issues, and the former often drowning out the latter. The result is like Reddit for programmers.
The moderation system also seems to optimize for mediocrity, often closing questions as opinion-based if there’s even a hint of nuance.
I used to spend time there every week answering questions on subjects that I understand well, but competing with broken incentives in an ocean of know-it-all personalities was tiring, so I almost never bother any more.
I would like to see something replace it. I don’t know what form that should take. A collective knowledge base with a culture like that on Hacker News would be interesting, though I don’t know if that’s feasible without someone selecting and paying good moderators.
It might not be much of a loss. The average quality of answers there has been mediocre for as long as I can remember.
Who cares what the average is? You only need one good answer. And even a shitty answer can often steer you in the right direction by pointing out a facet of the problem you missed by being too deep in the weeds. Bad answers can easily be edited to transform them into good answers or once the asker figures it out they can even answer it themselves, maybe a week later. Also it’s not just the person asking the question, but also every other person who stumbles across your question has a chance to be helped.
And on top of that, you could could add a bounty and you’d definitely get a good answer - as long as you have enough reputation to place a bounty, which was pretty trivial… just go answer other questions while waiting for yours to be answered and your your rep would climb high - doing that got me to the top 1% on the site.
Bad questions can also be edited to become good questions (often that’s as easy as marking it a duplicate, which then helps people who search with alternate phrases find what they’re looking for).
These days your question is likely to just be deleted. Even if it’s a good question… my rep is high enough that I see deleted stuff and it’s full of things that should not have been deleted - the fall of Stack Overflow is a travesty in my opinion.
Is this due to the chatgpt?
Its so exhausting having to train chat gpt to be condescending and to close all my threads as duplicates though
The perversity of SO rewarding people for ensuring that the answers on SO are becoming increasingly outdated absolutely befuddles me.
Probably chatgpt getting all the easy high volume questions, yeah.
ChatGPT went public at the start of the last kink downward. It can not be the reason for the big drop untill 2023.
Stack Overflow reached its maximum “duplicates”. So new users arent engaged on asking anything because it is of course already a duplicate of xyz.
Same thing came to my mind. Is it so bad if the content grows at a slower rate and the traffic of adding new content drops to a new equilibrium.
Tbf it’s a normal problem to have, it wasn’t meant to be a forum. But it looks like they haven’t considered what to do with the moving parts of the community once they reached content saturation. 😄
So why did they structure it as a forum?
It’s also a problem for advertisement revenue and therefore funding. If there is an active discouragement of any interaction because questions are simply closed as previously answered, then page views fall dramatically, and revenue with it. You only need to load a page once if the question and answer are already locked.
Isn’t it a good thing if your question is marked as a duplicate? That means you now have lots of answers readily available which already answered the question.
But then would you be like “Oh boy let me get slapped next time too”
I’d be like “Oh boy let me get redirected to lots of useful answers to my question next time too”.
I don’t understand why you would frame that as being “slapped”. Does having your question marked as a duplicate hurt your feelings?
No but it feels redundant then to ask it anyways.
Not really. A question that’s simply closed as a duplicate isn’t going to get any answers, and the answers to the original question, while they may have once been reasonable enough to be accepted, might be outdated.
Languages move on and add features, and closing any question as a duplicate precludes new, modern features that provides a better way to answer the original question.
A lot of content on SO is dated to say the least, precisely because reputation harvesters with a dated knowledge of the language are overly keen on closing questions.
Often the question marked as a duplicate isn’t a duplicate, just the person marking it as such didn’t spend the time to properly understand the question and realise how it differs. I also see lots of answers to questions mis-understanding the question or trying to force the person asking down their own particular preference, and get tons of votes whilst doing it.
Don’t get me wrong, some questions are definitely useful - and some go above-and-beyond - but on average the quality isn’t great these days and hasn’t been for a while.
IDK what shitoverflow gets out of being so fucking toxic. I asked one dumb question and I’m basically banned from posting on the website.
It feels like they’re trying to be a sort of “wikipedia” of every programming problem and solution. The problem is that eventually everything will be posted, and everyone will be banned from the website.
You were able to post on there at all? Don’t they have extremely high barriers to entry for even question comments?
Honestly, I put some effort into get some of their reputation points. Then I asked one question that I didn’t realize was dumb and I can’t post questions anymore. You’re welcome to see my profile and try to figure out how I did it 👍
lmao, how dare you be inquisitive
Not only post, but I have content that still feeds me residual cool-points even now.
I got a nastygram because I was editing the questions to follow a proper style and form (AP) and some people got upset that my comments were more “run on sentence” and " ‘emails’ and ‘helps’ both sound wrong as nouns for the same reason" instead of something like “there-there, Timmy”.
So I said “you can have free editing, or the next guy can be a people person instead.” And they agreed.
So I’m read-only there now too. :-D
I vaguely recall the first time I ever asked something on SO, around 2013, the first reply was “this has already been asked before”. No link to said previous question. Taught me to lurk and search more before asking anything there.
I sometimes also suffer a case of “explaining until I figure the question myself”, where the more details I punch into my question, the more likely I am to find the answer myself.
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The problem is that eventually everything will be posted, and everyone will be banned from the website.
I don’t think they see that as a problem, that’s the goal
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“you shouldn’t do that, do Y instead”
That’s one of my favorites: ignore the problem, only pick on the scope we can’t change.
I think it’s a behavior from work got carried over answering questions in StackOverflow. Usually when there’s a request from client/PM/PO, I usually ask them what they want to achieve by requesting said feature, usually after asking that question they will think and find out that making that pet feature is not the best way to achieve that goal.
As a Software Engineer we’re conditioned to respond that way to a question, and when we go to websites that’s specifically to answer questions, we are still answering questions from fellow technical people in that same mindset, which is not helpful.
However, I’ve used the condescending answers from StackOverflow to my advantage. Sometimes in a project we’ll get businesspeople with a technical background, either they used to be an engineer 15 years ago or they studied computer science in university but transitioned to product management after graduation. If they are really insistent on some technical detail, I usually created a StackOverflow question based on their request and show them all the comments telling how stupid that idea is.
If they are really insistent on some technical detail, I usually created a StackOverflow question based on their request and show them all the comments telling how stupid that idea is.
My favorite Codeless Code: The Purple Beggar.
…
The monk opened his laptop. “Five separate posters have each called me a blithering idiot and offered a simple solution to my problem, which they claim to have tested on their own systems.”
Yishi-Shing nodded. “My walk once took me past a beggar whose sign read, You do not DARE throw coins at ME! His body was purple with bruises but his bowl was always full.”
(before you spend too much time reading them, remember that there are mouseovers on the images… so you don’t have to go back and read them again)
Heh. Easy there, Satan. But I do like how you weaponised S.O ;-)
You have to build Rust from source, then install the dependencies with cargo, then update your node.js because it uses npm to manage it’s configurations and if your npm isn’t at least the current unstable version, the configs will be outdated. This worked for me on Arch, which is what I use btw.
You have to build Rust from source
As someone who actually did out of interest at one point, you’d be surprised how easy this is to do.
x.pyis a godsend.For the rest of your comment, it was immediately invalidated when you said you use Arch. The reality is that more people use Ubuntu, so you should be using Ubuntu too. Don’t use
apt? Figure it out yourself :P
I asked for advice on how to express something in UML once:
“No one cares whether you follow the UML standard, just make something up”
“But my company uses waterfall and requires UML diagrams to move onto the next phase of development!”
“That’s an issue with your company then. Ask your boss how to do it. Question closed.”
It isnt even my problem and I still despair reading this.
It feels like they’re trying to be a sort of “wikipedia” of every programming problem and solution.
That is exactly what stackoverflow is supposed to be. It’s not there to answer your question about “why is my IF statement not working”, it’s there to be a resource for all developers. How is a question about your specific problem gonna helps anyone ? If you haven’t, take the time to read the “how to ask” section, it describes what kind of questions are acceptable and what kind are not.
There is, obviously, some proper questions that should not have been deleted, but most of them are not suited for the site, as they don’t bring anything to the rest of the community.
If SO supposed to be wiki, then why there no clear way to update the answer with new information? Why only the person that asked the question can mark answer as correct? Clearly some person with more expirience should have possibility to mark answer as correct.
“You should be making a wiki page instead of a forum.”
- SO user on SO business model, thread closed Aug 2008
Depending on your reputation, you can edit the answer / comments of others. It’s usually not recommended to change the context of the question or the answer but you could. Those update will be reviewed by other if needed. As for the correct answer, you can always upvote the answer you feel is the correct one, which is kind of a community way of selecting the correct answer.
I used to mod on SO and a few SEs, but deleted my accounts a few years back. It’s just a mix of low-quality submissions, over-bearing moderators/admins, and bad culture & etiquette. I still regularly use SO when looking up questions, but I haven’t participated on there in a long while. I’ve mostly gone back to smaller forums and mailing lists.
what other forums do you use ?
Depends. I use vendor forums for vendor-specific Q&A (like the forums for ESP32, Mbed, FreeRTOS, etc). For other project questions, I open a Github issue with the “question” tag. Before, I used Reddit but it was rare that I’d get a “good” answer out of it.
Where exactly am I supposed to go for programming questions if SO goes under? I don’t suppose there’s a Fediverse equivalent?
Language specific communities
Codidact is a non-profit, open-source alternative run by (mostly former) SE people.
