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Posted by secretslol 2 days ago

What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph(data.stackexchange.com)
433 points | 520 commentspage 5
cpburns2009 1 day ago|
StackOverflow was on decline due to mismanagement and hostility towards the community. This was well before AI. AI was just the death blow.
clickety_clack 2 days ago||
The site looks like it was actually dying since 2014 and AI just turned off the life support.

It was such a hostile environment. It always seemed like you basically had to already know the answer to ask a question.

hazrmard 1 day ago||
Does the peak starting in mid-2020 correspond to mass speculative / adversarial / bandwagon hiring by tech companies during the pandemic?
pdpi 2 days ago||
Looking at that chart, AI seems to have not done much of anything at all to Stack Overflow. They were already in sharp decline before LLMs became widely available.
folkrav 2 days ago|
There is a pretty sharp acceleration of that decline around 2022/2023.
momocowcow 2 days ago||
Can it please do the same to reddit?
brynnbee 2 days ago|
If you made a chart showing real human activity on reddit I imagine there's a big decline. The obviousness of bots and bot upvoting is undeniable
AussieWog93 1 day ago||
Had the same thought. Since around 2022-2023, most subreddits insta-ban you or hide your posts unless you have x karma (you gain karma by posting and getting upvotes).

So unless you happen to have an old account with karma from pre-2022, the only new users whose posts are actually getting through are the ones that know the specific subreddits that let you "karma farm" - ie, mostly bots and bad actors.

Also tangentially related, much of the weirdness of Reddit ("Thanks for the gold, kind stranger", fedora-tipping, narwhals baconing at midnight, references to weird memes etc.) also happened to disappear after GPT-3 came out, and get replaced with really strong opinions about politics and investments.

h4kunamata 1 day ago||
Wrong, what SO did to themselves in a graph!

You cannot reply to a post to either provide correction or solution because you don't have enough "points" to do so.

You were forced to complete an insane list of requirements just to comment. Let that sink in.

npn 2 days ago||
Did they cry about it? No right? Don't apply your own standard then judge them about it, petty people.

Stackoverflow aimed to be a knowledge base. And knowledge base has a ceiling limit. They simply reached the point that almost all questions (regarding the knowledge) were asked for them. You can argue that newer or niche libraries or languages knowledge is still lacking there, but I have never seen them getting closed, just not answered.

dwedge 1 day ago||
I still use stack exchange, or I did until this week. I was looking for help with something and the answers and comments are intersliced with advertisements (albeit internal ones).

It's obvious that LLMs affected their traffic by a huge amount, but making the page flow worse for me was their doing

red_admiral 1 day ago||
I had the same experience as the next 100 or so commenters here. Asked about how to do something in Win11, got the question closed as a duplicate because there was already a Win 8 version with an answer that no longer applied. But apparently I could "leave a comment" on the old answer.
anticensor 1 day ago|
This query is even better: https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1948078/c...
nunez 1 day ago|
Wow, this one really highlights the collapse. Basically no new questions have been asked this year while unanswered questions climbed unabated.
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