Stack Overflow in freefall: 78 percent drop in number of questions

https://www.techzine.eu/news/devops/137686/stack-overflow-in-freefall-78-percent-drop-in-number-of-questions/

33 Comments

  1. Yea OpenAI copied everything from them. I once (long ago) tried to use it for coding and it gave me exactly the same answers to questions as I found on Stack Overflow. To the letter the same responses

  2. bubblegum-rose on

    I wonder if this is going to be a problem, considering that ChatGPT is basically just Reddit and StackOverflow in a trenchcoat

  3. Also, when I search for tech questions using duckduckgo or google now, stack overflow rarely pops up on the first two pages. It’s always other resources or Google AI summary

  4. So much punching down on Stack Overflow replies created a situation where any alternative was better than dealing with the people on that site.

  5. “Can I ask if any-”

    “REPEAT QUESTION USE THE SEARCH FUNCTION NEXT TIME DUMBASS”

    “Why does nobody ask questions on our platform anymore?”

  6. AltruisticRhubarb575 on

    i learned never to ask questions when i was doing my undergrad in cs before ai was even their biggest problem. just read already posted questions and documentation. toxic ass culture.

  7. OuterSpaceBootyHole on

    Not hard to understand why. Besides the advent of Generative AI, I swear that somebody’s helpfulness was inversely proportional to how rude they were. Biggest dickheads on that site never answered any questions but seemed to dominate every post. They eventually outnumbered the decent helpful people.

  8. It’s as hostile as asking things on some sub-reddits. You’re just told to use the broken search or given bad advice.

    It’s old JS meme, three people telling you to use Jquery and one person, downvoted, giving an actual answer to the question.

  9. Asked a question once…. and learned my lesson. Only helpful to look for solutions, not to ask for them.

  10. Well yeah your site was the quickest way to  be insulted after you left high school. It was the literal opposite of a helpful experience 

  11. AI ate stack overflow and all the old questions are in the model. But what about new questions? They will never come, and AI’s will not have good answers for them. Dead internet.

  12. Recently, I was searching for something and hit SO. I see the answer is outdated so I posted a new answer (basically something wasn’t possible before but it is now). Within 30 min, my answer is down voted. No comments. No justification. Just straight to -1. I hate SO.

  13. They sold themselves out for a quick buck to Open AI in May 2024 and now they are reaping the rewards.

    That’s the thing with most corporate culture, they can’t see further than their own noses.

  14. While this is very, very sad, and I consider SO essential for programming, I can’t feel much empathy to it: frequently when asking for questions, I was often replied in a superior manner, making me feel dumb or questioning my posts as if it was not a question to have. Not everyone was like that of course, many people were super nice, but when I think about SO I always get this bitter feeling.

  15. Cause all the answers have been ingested into AI and it provides a much friendlier answer.

  16. Stack Overflow was a honeypot designed to pull in novices for the site’s trolls to mercilessly ridicule.

  17. Why would I wait 3 hours for a cocky, overconfident, and ultimately wrong answer on SO when Codex can do it in 50 seconds? (/s but not _entirely_)

  18. Yeah, every time I asked a question on Stack Overflow I had to spend an extra hour obsessively proofreading and rewording it just to lower the odds of getting jumped. They let the culture become toxic and the moment a reasonable alternative appeared people immediately swapped.

  19. Stack overflow ruined itself by allowing the older members to start treating it like their fiefdom.  Basically allowing them to be condescending and closing questions as duplicate to a question whose answer is no longer possible.

    It’s sad to see, but social self management always devoles to this.

  20. Reasonable_Run_5529 on

    I love SO, have been using it for a decade, and it’s made me a better engineer. 

    Now, having said that, and despite what AI addicted teens might say, I believe this drop is being caused by multiple factors. 

    As far as I’m concerned, SO is blocking me.

    When I try to create a new question, I get a message saying “you can’t post new questions right now.” My questions need improvement. 

    However, I have only posted 20 questions in 10 years. I made sure no other questions answered my issue. I have updated all questions, made sure most have an accepted answer. Provided snippets and reproducible code. 

    In other words, I’m your average SO user, and yet I’m banned from using it.

    Of course I’ve been using other similar boards, I still need to make some progress…

  21. Yall know what happens from here right?

    AI is feeding on its own slop. No new ideas. Incomplete inaccurate, often manipulated information.

    We are not the ones to build AI.

  22. The few times I asked a question people were either incredibly rude or it was marked as a duplicate….yet the original question didn’t have an answer to my problem. Haven’t posted on there in over a decade at this point

  23. TheDragonDoji on

    I always got bad or plain rude replies, so I started posting my question alongside my attempted “solution”, clearly incorrect.

    Managed to piece together an actual working solution from the number of raging comments telling me how wrong I was.

  24. We’re sorry, this post has been posted before. Please see related posts

    [ links to posts that arnt actually related ]

  25. I got downvoted trying to answer a question about a project I wrote. The top voted answer was flat wrong.