The Fall of Stack Overflow
The Fall of Stack Overflow
Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around 50% of its traffic. This decline is similarly reflected in site usage, with approximately a 50% decrease in the number of questions and answers, as well as the number of votes these posts receive. The charts below show the usage repr...
Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around 50% of its traffic. This decline is similarly reflected in site usage, with approximately a 50% decrease in the number of questions and answers, as well as the number of votes these posts receive.
The charts below show the usage represented by a moving average of 49 days.
What happened?
Amazing how much hate SO receives here. As knowledge base it's working super good. And yes, a lot of questions have been answered already. And also yes, just like any other online community there's bad apples which you have to live with unfortunately.
Idolizing ChatGPT as a viable replacementis laughable, because it has no knowledge, no understanding, of what it says. It's just repeating what it "learned" and connected. Ask about something new and it will simply lie, which is arguably worse than an unfriendly answer in my opinion.
I think the issue is how people got to Stack Overflow. People generally ask Google first, which hopefully would take you somewhere where somebody has already asked your question and it has answers.
Type a technical question into Google. Back in the day it would likely take you to Experts Exchange. Couple of years later it would take you to Stack Overflow. Now it takes you to some AI generated bullshit that scraped something that might have contained an answer, but was probably just more AI generated bullshit.
Either their SEO game is weak, they stopped paying Google as much for result placement, or they've just been overwhelmed with limitless nonsense made by bots for the sole purpose of selling advertising space that other bots will look at.
Or maybe I'm wrong and everybody is just asking ChatGPT their technical questions now, in which case god fucking help us all...
Understandably, it has become an increasingly hostile or apatic environment over the years. If one checks questions from 10 years ago or so, one generally sees people eager to help one another.
Now they often expect you to have searched through possibly thousands of questions before you ask one, and immediately accuse you if you missed some – which is unfair, because a non-expert can often miss the connection between two questions phrased slightly differently.
On top of that, some of those questions and their answers are years old, so one wonders if their answers still apply. Often they don't. But again it feels like you're expected to know whether they still apply, as if you were an expert.
Of course it isn't all like that, there are still kind and helpful people there. It's just a statistical trend.
Honestly.
Stackoverflow is a horrible place to ask anything.
I have had 100% legit, well documented questions, closed as duplicate of unrelated other question.
Its... honestly, just not a friendly place to go. Full of a bunch of assholes....
Most of the answers actually suck too. Many times, you will find the correct answer downvoted, and incorrect or bad answers upvoted.
There's an open source equivalent at https://codidact.com/
It's hostile to new users and when you do ask you will likely not get answer might get scolded or just get closed as duplicate. Then there is the fact that most has answers doesn't matter if it's outdated or just bad advice. Pretty much everything has GitHub now. Usually I just go raise the question there if I have a genuine question get an answer from the developers themselves. Or just go to their website api/ library doc they have gotten good lately. Then finally recent addition with chatgpt you can ask just about any stupid question you have and maybe it may give some idea to fix the problem you encounter. Pretty much the ultimate rubber duck buddy.
It's too much to attribute to any one effect. 50% is a lot for a website of this size (don't forget that Lemmy exploded from a migration of <5% Reddit usershare). Let's KISS by attributing likely causes in order of magnitude:
- ChatGPT became the world's fastest growing website in a single month and it's actually half-decent at being a code tutor
- ChatGPT bots got unleashed on SO and diluted a lot of SO's comparative advantages
- Stack Overflow moderators went on strike, which further damaged content quality
- Structurally speaking, SO is an environment which tends to become more elitist over time. As the userbase becomes progressively more self-selective, the population shrinks.
- The SO format requires a stream of novel questions, but novel questions generally get rarer over time
- Developer documentation has generally improved over time. On SO, asking about a well-documented thing is a short-circuit pathway to getting RTFM'd & discussion locked
In my experience many of the answers have become out of date. It's gradually becoming an archive of the old ways of doing things for many languages / frameworks.
Questions are often closed as a duplicate when the linked question doesn't apply anymore. It's full of really bad ways of doing things.
I'm not really sure of the solution at this point.
Also ChatGPT.
It's a last resort for me nowadays.
One aspect that I've always been unsure about, with Stack Overflow, and even more with sibling sites like Physics Stack Exchange or Cross Validated (stats and probability), is the voting system. In the physics and stats sites, for example, not rarely I saw answers that were accepted and upvoted but actually wrong. The point is that users can end up voting for something that looks right or useful, even if it isn't (probably less the case when it comes to programming?).
Now an obvious reply to this comment is "And how do you know they were wrong, and non-accepted ones right?". That's an excellent question – and that's exactly the point.
In the end the judge about what's correct is only you and your own logical reasoning. In my opinion this kind of sites should get rid of the voting or acceptance system, and simply list the answers, with useful comments and counter-comments under each. When it comes to questions about science and maths, truth is not determined by majority votes or by authorities, but by sound logic and experiment. That's the very basis from which science started. As Galileo put it:
But in the natural sciences, whose conclusions are true and necessary and have nothing to do with human will, one must take care not to place oneself in the defense of error; for here a thousand Demostheneses and a thousand Aristotles would be left in the lurch by every mediocre wit who happened to hit upon the truth for himself.
For example, at some point in history there was probably only one human being on earth who thought "the notion of simultaneity is circular". And at that time point that human being was right, while the majority who thought otherwise were wrong. Our current education system and sites like those reinforce the anti-scientific view that students should study and memorize what "experts" says, and that majorities dictate what's logically correct or not. As Gibson said (1964): "Do we, in our schools and colleges, foster the spirit of inquiry, of skepticism, of adventurous thinking, of acquiring experience and reflecting on it? Or do we place a premium on docility, giving major recognition to the ability of the student to return verbatim in examinations that which he has been fed?"
Alright sorry for the rant and tangent! I feel strongly about this situation.
Tried to answer a question got shutdown by mods immediately. I was wondering how stack overflow is going to survive. I know now it won't.
I bet Google searching in general has gone down too. It's often times quicker to just ask ChatGPT for an answer, and usually you can tell when an answer is correct or not. It's like the old days of manually searching on Google for StackOverflow questions and then finding answers, and then trying to determine which one will work.
Stack Exchange has been making a large number of bad calls over the past few years. Basically pissing off their moderators. The first one was Monica who actually sued them for it (libel or defamation or something, basically they said she was being transphobic or something when she wasn't) and they settled. Around that time, possibly before, they removed a site from their Hot Network Questions because of a single tweet. Combine that with them constantly ignoring Stack Exchange Meta (where users and admins are meant to interact for the better of the site and discuss the sites themselves). Moderators were understandably furious when their posts get ignored in the place where Stack Exchange says they're meant to communicate when a random tweet gets more attention and immediate action.
More recently they've given different instructions privately to moderators than what they said publicly with regards to suspected AI content.
I mean, combine all of that with how hostile the users of the site are. Accusing you of not searching before posting and marking your question as a duplicate because they think it is and refusing to listen to why you say it isn't.
As alluded to by comments here already, a long coming death.
Will probably go down as a marker of the darker side of tech culture, which, not coincidentally (?) manifested at time when the field was most confused as to what constitutes its actual discipline and whether it was an engineering field at all.
People isn't considering that documentation has greatly improved over time, languages and frameworks have become more abstract, user-friendly, modern code is mostly self explanatory, good documentation has become the priority of all open source projects, well documented open source languages and frameworks have become the norm.
Less people asking programming related questions can be explained by programming being an easier and less problematic experience nowadays, that is true.
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As long as a LLM doesn't run into a corner, making the same mistakes over and over again, it is magical to just paste some code, ask what's wrong with it and receiving a detailed explanation + fix. Even better is when you ask "now can you add this and this to it?" and it does.
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I routinely skip SO unless I've already exhausted most possibilities. If it was ever a good place to get answers, I frankly didn't see it. What I did see was infinite amounts of bitching about "bad" questions, non-duplicate duplicates, lazy-ass people who just wanted an excuse not to answer, and assorted people tripping on their little iota of perceived "power".
Hell, even the indexed results on Google etc. just stopped being even remotely useful a few years back. After that, most shit I searched for ended up in an unanswered and possibly locked question with some passive-aggressive bullshit remark. It's got the culture of helpfulness of a 2003 gaming forum - except the people telling everyone else to go fuck themselves are mods, not pubertal kids. (Although if the mods were pubertal kids that would actually explain quite a bit)
The pandemic ended
I suppose the same amount of experts are on stackoverflow and they live in good times. There isn't too much spam to hate about.
The mosts visits to SO does a novice programmer. Currently they live off of AI answers and from more experienced co-workers.
I think the school of SO will last and the community is not hostile; But some people tend to forget that the quality of a question is very important.
Other factors:
SO jobs was shut down.
There is no new technology which enables a new SO chapter. There aren't too many new questions about AI.
What do you think?