StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month

Posted by babelfish 13 hours ago

StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month(data.stackexchange.com)

559 points | 463 commentspage 13

6510 12 hours ago|

This question has already been asked?

Pages bloated like myspace make me reluctant to click the search result and I wont browse around if a website doesn't load instantly. Search some exotic kind of bad. That they haven't implemented an LLM is quite untechnological.

It should have an LLM assist with constructing the questions and it should have answers from all providers willing to donate tokens. Upvotes should generate wonderful data on how to construct an answer.

esafak 12 hours ago||

It is sad because it was such a well designed community. But its lessons live on.

kstrauser 12 hours ago||

Nah. It launched well, but sorely needed a BDFL. Almost without fail, services that delegate moderation duties to users are ruined. Inevitably, well-meaning people form councils and boards, and then those get taken over by people with nothing but time on their hands. It's the same thing that happens with school boards and HOAs: the last people you want running them are the ones that have the time and the drive to actually want to be in charge of them.

esafak 11 hours ago|||

How are you going to run a community at scale without delegation? The only alternative is to let the computer do it.

kstrauser 11 hours ago||

HN does a pretty good job of it. Turns out paid employees seem to be more incentivized to keep people coming back.

nullsanity 12 hours ago|||

[dead]

jdthorpe 12 hours ago|||

It was an AMAZING community... right up until it wasn't. I cut my teeth on trying to answer questions and learned how much I didn't know when other people's answers were better than mine. Literally made a career out of what I learned there, and I thoroughly enjoyed welcoming people to SO and encouraging new coders to keep learning. But then dang, the question purists and eager close-every-question jocks came to dominate the platform and made it no fun to ask or answer. Even if AI was never a thing, the change in culture probably would have opened the doors to a competitor.

glouwbug 12 hours ago|||

Everything is cyclical. Maybe they come back when AI gets heavily regulated or pay gated. Who knows

hackersnooze1 12 hours ago|||

does well designed mean rotten and pointlessly hostile

reassess_blind 12 hours ago|||

StackOverflow helped build the LLMs that replaced it.

gscott 10 hours ago||

They should just make all of their answers incorrect, poison llms, return everybody back to programming again.

eluru 12 hours ago||

it was as well designed as the nipples on a man

paulddraper 13 hours ago||

The highly technical sites -- StackOverflow, Unix & Linux, MathOverflow -- see little use.

Others like SciFi & Fantasy and Worldbuilding have kept relevance.

Unfortunately, these more niche sites relied on StackOverflow to drive referral traffic, so the whole platform is declining.

paulpauper 13 hours ago||

I am amazed it's still that high

eluru 12 hours ago||

good, make it die faster

etchalon 11 hours ago||

SO suffered from its success and, bluntly, the laziness of humans.

I remember when I started the getting the distinct feeling that most of the questions being asked weren't being asked by genuine developers struggling with a concept or problem, but were basically "do my job for me" types, largely overseas developers.

I stopped contributing.

astura 3 hours ago||

Back in the early days of SO, around 2009 or maybe 2010, I asked a Motif question. I got told that I I was an idiot and I shouldn't be using Motif because it was obsolete, how dare I ask a question about it? Blah blah blah.

Yeah, no shit nobody uses Motif for new development, but if you haven't guessed, I was working on a legacy enterprise system.

Just rubbed me the wrong way and still kinda annoys me to this day. Not everyone is dicking around for fun or works at startups where you can light other people's money on fire. Some of us have paying clients, I'm not using Motif because I want to.

tamimio 9 hours ago||

The question that a lot of people aren’t asking, these AI models were trained on human actual data, researches, answers, and books. Now AI removed the need to create those and people aren’t incentivized to make any new ones, the newer models say in a year or so will be trained on slop, piles and piles of slop, how’s their intelligence will be?

shevy-java 5 hours ago||

SO died some time ago already though; I'd say even before AI.

I remember that I once asked a question about dual-licencing MIT and GPL 2.0 in the same project. Within an hour or two, it was downvoted to -7. Now this alone is already quite concerning (it was a genuine question), but what was even more annoying was that not a single person who downvoted this, explained as to why. So, if my time investment here for asking a question, gets negative karma without any explanation, and then subsequently no useful answer at all: what is the point of SO? I still answered a few questions here or there, but the whole karma system just discourages contributions and I stopped using it with regards to both asking anything or giving answers.

SO is not useless since some answers still hold useful answers, but they really should have started to fix SO early on. Instead they just gave up.

BrenBarn 11 hours ago|

I haven't used it as much recently, but to be honest I think low volume could be one of the best things for it. The aggressive moderation that a lot of people complain about was largely a consequence of the colossal traffic that existed in SO's heyday, with people posting duplicates of basic questions constantly. A quieter site based on the same concept might be more useful to all concerned (except maybe venture capitalists, but screw them).

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