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
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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 lack vision, but I see a place where people get blocked and their questions opened then immediately closed as duplicates. Opened and closed, opened and closed all day, all night. Soon, where the internet once stood will be a string of condescending experts, admonitions that “you shouldn’t do that, do Y instead”, pleas for information closed as off-topic. Passive aggression, spiteful ego contests and wonderful, wonderful karma meters reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it’ll be beautiful.
“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 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 👍
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
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.
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 bet this is directly related to ChatGPT
People prefer having something generating shitty code and not checking it, instead of asking or searching on internet for a substantially better solution
Because forum posts are always full of accurate and helpful information?
In my experience it still makes good suggestions for most things, and is better than trying to phrase things in a way that Google likes, then trawling through irrelevant forum posts.
It’s only there to make suggestions, so if someone is taking its output without understanding and treating it like gospel then they’re an idiot who’s inevitably going to end up in a world of trouble.
If you take the suggestion, verify it with documentation, then make sure you actually understand it, chatGPT is a great tool.
If I’m honest, stackoverflow was always a shortcut for searching documentation to me.
Simple stuff like how do I turn an InputStream to a String again? I can’t remember it, but I know exactly what to look for, I’m just to lazy.
For that kind of stuff ChatGPT is almost perfect.
Because forum posts are always full of accurate and helpful information?
Not necessarily, but at least there’s much more opportunity for other people to jump in and correct false info or expand upon something. It’s by no means a flawless system, but it’s better than only have one source of information
I didn’t say that people should go on the internet and pick the first forum post either ; that would be like trusting whatever chatgpt is handing you :p
My point was more on the “people are lazy” side of things, but yeah you have to stay critical of both chatgpt and forum posts.
ChatGPT is a great tool to get you started on stuff. I use it to better formulate my issues in technical terms.
I just started embedded Linux, so there are a lot of stuff that aren’t intuitive. ChatGPT has been immensely useful to get around cross compiling for embedded linux, and understanding the quirks of the native libraries without having to go back and forth in a forum and not get an answer after a few days
If you know your stuff already, ChatGPT is not the right tool. If you don’t know where to start, ChatGPT is the best tool ever made because you can clarify and ask for more detail in real time. This is like a personal tutor for free.
You can have it generate shitty code and then compare it against examples it finds online to iterate that code. Also, it was trained on the whole internet, including those good solutions, and can often reproduce them on its own. but you have to tell it, explicitly, to do all this to make better code, rather than just asking for the code.
You are delusional and will be left behind if that is your view point. The code is usually largely accurate only needing a few tweaks. Easily one of the most powerful scaffolding and learning tool I’ve used in 25 years. Our developers embracing it are more efficient then ever and passing static analysis, owasp scans, coding standards just fine if not better than cranky old devs who think they couldn’t possibly be helped by a dumb machine.
I prefer being delusional and a cranky old dev, rather than trusting AI by giving all of my workplace code and logic. Powerful? Maybe. Helping you ship products faster? I don’t know ; no metrics have been published about that in controlled settings, and I still think people will get lazy and after some time even the ones that tweaked the code and analyzed it thoroughly will just stop caring.
Go ahead, jump in that bandwagon, and prove me wrong in 5 years. All I want is proof.
Also, I didn’t know one could be a cranky old dev after a few years of experience only
I think it’s overblown tbh.
In my experience it still makes good suggestions for most things, and is better than trying to phrase things in a way that Google likes, then trawling through irrelevant forum posts.
It’s only there to make suggestions, so if someone is taking its output without understanding and treating it like gospel then they’re an idiot who’s inevitably going to end up in a world of trouble.
If you take the suggestion, verify it with documentation, then make sure you actually understand it, chatGPT is a great tool.
ChatGPT has been a great tool to help me teach coding. It lets my students with a few months experience write better code, as if they had a few extra months experience, but like you say it’s very easy to get in trouble with it. We had it generate some code to interface a web app with some cloud triggers, and chatGPT suggested we put all the API keys / creds right there in the front end where anyone with “view source” could see them. It made for a really good lesson, actually, on the need to gain experience, understand what code does , and to validate with documentation.
trawling through irrelevant forum posts.
This makes it worth it from just a time savings perspective. Also, describing it as trawling is very accurate lol. It takes a lot of trawling to get the answer you need, and even then sometimes it isn’t right because you’re relying on a single individual’s answer.
I agree that it isn’t as good as it was. The last two updates have definitely decreased its effectiveness for multiple things, not just dev. It is still my starting point when looking for something. It is just not as good as it used to be.
Obviously, you can’t take what it gives at face value, but you shouldn’t do that from SO either. In general, I see faster results using GPT than I do with Google and SO. You can also extend the responses with any customization or changes specific to what you are trying to do, where you can’t with SO.
I’m not saying SO is bad. Not by any stretch. I still use it a lot. It just isn’t my starting point anymore.
Doesn’t need to be good. Just good enough that people need SO less often. If GitHub Copilot gives a code suggestion, I don’t need to look up some syntax or some method I forgot. I’m reminded, and can see that it’s correct. No searching online required.
is that what people used stackoverflow for? I google cheatsheets for simple syntax reminders.
What I found stack overflow useful for was ‘I have this random bug in this random browser / os combo - here’s what hasn’t worked, has anyone dealt with it?’ - and then hopefully we can all share the misery of this bug until someone figures out the source.
Not sure where to go for that type of thing anymore.
It’s a little more decent than you give credit for. I use it all the time for easy generic subroutines and functions. It struggles a bit with specific, complex requests but is generally pretty versatile as a miniature code assistant. It’s good at catching human errors like loops starting or ending at the wrong specified integer, so I use it as a debugging tool.
I think it’s the junior dev blog spam and search results putting them higher.
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.
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
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 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.
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)
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.
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
SO is a shithole, just like Reddit. All the work is done by volunteers. When it was time to cash out with the platform, they also did several things to fuck with their community. I’ve contributed quite a bit to the trilogy sites, and served as a moderator. I regret every second of it. But at least a few people got rich in the process.
I don’t get why programmers, especially ones actually working on open source projects, insist on using proprietary services. Stack Overflow is one, also GitHub.
It’s unfortunate, but the reality is that many of the proprietary services are… free, convenient, and where the people are.
Most projects do not have a lot of funding, so it makes sense to use low cost platforms with the least amount of friction. I think most developers are aware of the risks and trade-offs, but make a pragmatic decision to use these proprietary services b/c the benefits for them outweigh the costs.
I used to go to SO and really liked it. I haven’t been in a long time though and didn’t know about this. What are your thoughts about Quora? Seems similar to me.
