BenLloydPearsonThe Fall of Stack Overflow
canpolat
The Fall of Stack Overflow
Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around ~~50%~~ 35% of its traffic (Update: Around 15% of the observed loss seems to be related to the recategorization of the Google Analytics Cookie around May 2022. The chart was updated to only include data after that change). 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 b
Oh wow, thanks. I didn’t realize that making this an image post got rid of the link
Yeah, I don’t know if it’s a bug or a feature. I got a similar problem before with one of my posts. I think a workaround would be to post it as a link and paste the image in the
Body.
ericjmoreyI bet this is directly related to ChatGPT
I thought chatgpt is kinda shit now since the newest updates
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 me 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.
SuperFolaPeople 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.
Sadly there are so many people that take its output as gospel and don’t realise it can be wrong. So is a tool that commonly gets abused by people that don’t know how to use it.
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.
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.
I agree, I just think that those lazy people will do what they do regardless of where they get their info.
To butcher a saying; blame the craftsman, not the tools.
I half expect that, if enough programmers use ChatGPT-written code verbatim, someday it’s going to lead to Skynet. I mean, what’s to stop ChatGPT from inserting bits of extra code to be used for its own distributed processing botnet?
A lack of intelligence and awareness?
You’ve never written code, have you?
WrenBecause 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
When we use forums there’s also an opportunity to correct (or be corrected) on how we deal with problems.
I’ve seen a few times people asking how to do X while they’re actually trying to do Y. ChatGPT would gladly direct them to the wrong path.
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.
goslingYou mean shitty code which you can just check and ask them to change in almost real time, over posting your question on SO and waiting for months for an answer?
AidanYou 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 to do all that, 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
People who fail to understand the value of peer-reviewed code are just going to copy/paste bad, but popular, code practices.
There irony here is that Stackoverflow was considered a common source of copy/pasted code.
At least ChatGPT will not flag the question as duplicate.
“I’m sorry, as an AI language model this question has been asked too many times and there is insufficient computer resources to handle your request. You’ve been temporarily silenced for 15 minutes.”
Chatgpt is still a tool and it’s up to the user how to use it. If you google “bolognese recipe” you get one result; if you Google “traditional ragu from Bologna” you get another. Same for ChatGPT.
ChatGPT isn’t that good at code generation lol.
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.
🐱TheCatis 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.
Not exactly why people seek out SO, but it shows up in Google searches and people click. Now there are fewer google searches for that sort of thing.
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.
ChatGPT needs to start bullying the people asking for code samples or saying that they should google the answer themselves.
This is fine🔥🐶☕🔥Can you write a code that would sort the input string from smallest to largest?
You would like to have it, wouldn’t you? You fucken nerd.
I think it’s the junior dev blog spam and search results putting them higher.
I’m not sure what you mean.
bahmanmIt doesn’t look to be a decline at all (quite healthy on the contrary) until around the time ChatGPT was released.
quite healthy
Right…
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.
Agreed. For me, making it so that the search engine ignores -string was one of the biggest set backs.
REdOGthe 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!
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. ;-)
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.
pelotronWait WHAT? I was just asking on discord there 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.
supercheesecakeHmm, 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?
DaveI 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.
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.
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.