Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

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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-stackoverflow

…if so, it was published a year ago: 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.

> 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.

More complex questions are OK-ish, but the site's audience is not really setup for them.

They have to be asked in the sort of detail that most of those asking do not otherwise any answers end up either wrong (because of details not known at the time of writing) or at least as vague as the question. Also, a long question will put people off actually interacting with it which is one of the reasons people aren't going to change how they ask the question, that and sometimes people don't realise that their question isn't simple (though why they don't realise that when they can't search for a simple answer seems like an odd disconnect to me!).

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.

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.

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 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.

Your story resonates with mine, and is also a complete opposite of what most people claim is the problem. Most people say "SO is full of unfriendly power users", and that's why it's in decline. But to me it's the opposite. The power users are what made SO, and they're tired of the influx of badly written questions, entitled people they're trying to help for free etc., of course people get burned out. But it's the useful users going away.

Hey, starting to write a reply to you caused me to remember why I quit. It was the moderation tools for sure.

One of them changed so that when you reviewed something it would show you at random a sample that had already been reviewed, but this was not indicated in any way. If you got the review "correct" it said "well done, that was to test you are paying attention!" - it was even more patronizing if you got it wrong.

I was so annoyed that they had wasted my time in this way that I stopped contributing all together. It was a wake up call that the whole site was taking advantage of our free labor, and I decided to do better things with my time.

For that you really need a conversation with a relevant person or people, where they can ask clarifying questions and the whole thing is discussed in a more fine-grained manner, which is not what SO was ever intended for. SO is more geared around a direct question→answer workflow, with some secondary support for clarifying questions via the comments areas.

/r/android then post a wrong answer with another account.

If you participate in using reddit you become part of the problem, please don't.

You are not wrong particularly, though you don't say which problem you are concerned about with Reddit, and you completely fail to mention any sort of alternative.

When someone asks “how do I X” and the only answer is “do Y”, just saying “don't do Y” is not helpful because that amounts to “don't do X” and the original asker might not have/want that option.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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).

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