StackOverflow Usage Plummets as AI Chatbots Rise (devclass.com) 66
Developer Q&A platform StackOverflow appears to be facing an existential crisis as volume of new questions on the site has plunged 75% from the 2017 peak and 60% year-on-year in December 2024, according to StackExchange Data Explorer figures.
The decline accelerated after ChatGPT's launch in November 2022, with questions falling 76% since then. Despite banning AI-generated answers two years ago, StackOverflow has embraced AI partnerships, striking deals with Google, OpenAI and GitHub.
The decline accelerated after ChatGPT's launch in November 2022, with questions falling 76% since then. Despite banning AI-generated answers two years ago, StackOverflow has embraced AI partnerships, striking deals with Google, OpenAI and GitHub.
May the best AI win. (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe because AI gives better answers than stack overflow.
Re:May the best AI win. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: May the best AI win. (Score:3)
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In general, if the question isn't easily found by a search, posting a question can be pointless. Often, it will die without even a whimper with no responses, because someone looking to make an easy reply can't easily answer it. Or, it will have a bunch of responses that do little to nothing to help. Maybe someone had the exact same problem [xkcd.com] as I did, but found the answer. If I rephrase the question, perhaps to find some insight and show what I've tried, that likely will get nailed for spam, or just voted
Re:May the best AI win. (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe because AI gives better answers than stack overflow.
Except that I've found quite a bit of AI generated code that looks very similar to what I found on StackOverflow. Pretty funny when the code you get from ChatGPT is the code from the question that doesn't really work!
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But you can ask ChatGPT to change something in the code. Try to ask the SO poster who posted 4 years ago the incorrect answer. If he is still active he may actually follow up and explain that you are just too dumb to understand his answer correctly.
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At least with ChatGPT you can tell it that it's a moron that gave you non working code, and get an apology.
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I mean we're blaming this all on AI, which surely is the bulk of it, but, how much of this traffic drop can we attribute to tech layoffs? Tens of thousands of developers have been laid off in the last couple of years... that's not an insignificant amount of traffic to a specific website like this.
Re: May the best AI win. (Score:2)
if you were a "developer" relying on bullshit like "stackoverflow" it's a good fucking thing you got fired. holy shit the state of application development today on both desktop and mobile. maybe more layoffs needs to happen to get more quality software written by real programmers.
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As someone who has worked with developers, almost all I've worked with were using StackOverflow as their source of truth, copying and pasting. It got to the point where I'd turn down a pull request and mention the link to the SO link, tell them they need to use different code.
Right now, it isn't layoffs that would help things. Layoffs got rid of all the good devs. Most devs now are contractors or sub-contractors working for a WITCH company and either offshore, or are in a boiler room with H-1B visas, bei
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There are plenty of reasons to ask on stackoverflow, or search for an existing answer.
For instance on my old mac I boot sometimes from an external USB drive.
And this particular macOS version does not mount the swap partition. (And on top of that you can not freely configure where the swap partition is, I would have preferred it on the internal drive)
It is surprisingly complex to get that fixed. I settled in the end to a two liner and sudo run it manually now ... after all the machine gets only booted every
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Maybe because AI gives better answers than stack overflow.
Basically because AI gives comparable answers to Stack Overflow (and Google). Somehow there's this huge illusion that web search and stack overflow always gives the right answer. That's never been true. There is helpful truth, scattered about and mixed in with lots of untruths and irrelevant truths. That's always been true. So, even if AI is not always right, it's still usually more efficient and often more helpful than doing the web search or scrolling through and reading Stack Overflow.
I use ChatGPT
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It is faster, less arrogant, more interactive and often better than SO.
You get your answer instantly, inside your IDE. It is polite. You can instantly clarify things and ask follow up questions. And many models know a lot about best-practices, what you can't say about the typical SO answer.
We will still need human Q&A spaces, but way less than before. And all the questions that were rightfully closed as duplicate are exactly the reason why AI chats even help to keep the human spaces useful.
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the AI was trained on the StackOverflow code?
Re: May the best AI win. (Score:3)
Re: May the best AI win. (Score:2)
AI was trained on StackOverflow. Surely, garbage in, garbage out?
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We get immediate responses instead of waiting for days or months or sometimes never. The long wait times for responses, follow up questions and follow up responses was a big quality issue that stackoverflow failed to address. It was busy pocketing money from volunteer (free) services.
Instant gratification wins every time... (Score:1)
Why wait hours, days, or weeks for an answer when AI can give you one right away?
And even if it is a wrong answer, you can discuss and explore different options.
SO doesn't really stand a chance against that kind of opponent.
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The problem is the long run.
In the short term AI quick and easy wins, but I've learned a lot from stack overflow discussions, and as things move on and stack overflow withers it'll be harder to get better making people even more replaceable by AI because people will more and more be no better than AI (especially AI keeps getting better).
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Stackoverflow is a silo of information. They monetized that silo and milked it, then (LOL) they GAVE IT AWAY. Every publisher and platform owner that opens themselves to AI rape will wither and hit the bit bucket. But wow, that up front fee will sure make their (last) quarter look REALLY GOOD!
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If platforms like SO wither away, then so would AI. Because AI gets trained on platforms like SO. We still do not have true AI that can go read a book, do some real-world projects and learn along the way and then give informed answers. Until then I guess it's a sine wave like a predator-prey model. AI butchers the content it was trained on. Next content disappears and AI starts to suck. Then content thrives once again and then again AI butchers it once again. The first wave has just begun.
Once all the questions are answered... (Score:3)
Their business model only has continual engagement if they let previous questions expire... and remove them so someone has to answer again.
Re: Once all the questions are answered... (Score:2)
Re: Once all the questions are answered... (Score:3)
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why would anyone ask it again?
Have you tried posting this question there?
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The number of potential questions exceeds the number of atoms in the universe -- so you'll never store the answer to all of them.
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The universe is infinite. The Gold is in this pot. Pick one... Vala
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Think about it, eventually all the answers are already answered, why would anyone ask it again?
This is only true in a static universe where new languages/APIs/etc are never created and existing languages/APIs/etc are never extended. Maybe we'll get there someday -- after computers have been entirely commoditized -- but we're not there yet.
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Kind of like how the USPTO considered shutting down in 1899 because everything that could be invented, had already been invented.
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Symbiotic Condition Applies (Score:4, Insightful)
chatbots are just another presentation of what it's already in StackOverflow. It can be considered as "another view" of the same data. The thing is, chatbots do not produce new knowledge. If you ask it a question regarding a new technology it will produce crap output since it will be "guessing."
Unless these chatbots really have AI, they will then need humans to ask question for new technologies in StackOverflow and then have those answered questions fed back to chatbots.
StackOverflow's affluence will fluctuate between the rise of new technologies until chatbots are more than patter matching on steroids and began to think and understand the world around them.
Re:Symbiotic Condition Applies (Score:4, Interesting)
chatbots are just another presentation of what it's already in StackOverflow. It can be considered as "another view" of the same data. The thing is, chatbots do not produce new knowledge. If you ask it a question regarding a new technology it will produce crap output since it will be "guessing."
Unless these chatbots really have AI, they will then need humans to ask question for new technologies in StackOverflow and then have those answered questions fed back to chatbots.
StackOverflow's affluence will fluctuate between the rise of new technologies until chatbots are more than patter matching on steroids and began to think and understand the world around them.
I think the idea that chatbots are just tools repackaging existing knowledge misses the mark. As a former sysadmin for a very large defense contractor, I relied heavily on forums like Slashdot and even USENET (I know, I'm dating myself) for help in solving recurring technical challenges. I can tell you, I would've given my left nut for an AI assistant back then—something that could grep through endless posts, synthesize the relevant information, and give me some novel options to explore for my problem du jour. And when I say "novel," I mean exactly that: a fresh perspective on the problem, informed by the questions and answers from others who tackled similar issues. Generative AI like ChatGPT excels at this, though with a reasonable GIGO caveat, as you rightly point out.
I honestly don't think that chatbots are just regurgitating StackOverflow answers. They can combine knowledge across domains and present insights in ways that save time and effort. That’s not “pattern matching on steroids”; it’s solving the exact kind of problems that used to keep me trawling forums late into the night.
To me, the real issue here isn’t AI. It’s StackOverflow’s engagement model. Strict moderation and an unwelcoming atmosphere drive people away, especially newcomers. If fewer people are asking and answering questions, it’s no surprise the platform is in decline. Blaming chatbots for that misses the point, I think. Devs are choosing AI assistants because they’re faster, more user-friendly, and don’t close your questions for being “opinion-based.” I think StackOverflow still has a place, particularly for tackling problems in a highly emergent arena like software engineering, but it needs to adapt if it wants to stay relevant. Otherwise, AI assistants are going to eat its lunch, as the stats are starting to show.
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SO became an MMORPG years ago, with long time players doing everything they can go deter noobs.
An answer may be terrible, but it's a key part of someone's rank so it can't be deleted or fixed.
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SO became an MMORPG years ago, with long time players doing everything they can go deter noobs.
An answer may be terrible, but it's a key part of someone's rank so it can't be deleted or fixed.
That is an interesting comparison. If I could spend mod points here, that's a +1 insightful.
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The answer can be fixed. But only by people with a high enough rank. :P
If you can fix your own answers, I am not sure. But I can edit yous for sure
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and don’t close your questions for being “opinion-based.”
This rule itself is actually opinion-based so there's a vote to determine if a question should be closed. https://meta.stackoverflow.com... [stackoverflow.com]
So it's not surprising that some questions are closed even though the answers could be useful.
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Time for Sam Altman to start paying StackOverflow for the continued supply. Back-pay is in order too.
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Well SO didn't pay me for my answers! Maybe it's time for that too.
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Don't forget all the people who spend there evenings being petulant about misinterpreting your answer and insisting that you formatted it incorrectly.
They can't let even the simplest things go when the meaning was clear and helpful.
I so rarely post answers there anymore. It's just asking for hassles and nitpicking about word choice and willful misinterpretation.
There's no quality filter on bad editors at all.
Almost nobody would mind actual clarifications and improvements.
Imagine an AI being trained to be l
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And if you actually know how to take a train across the Alps and give an answer, your answer will be down voted, because the rabid group-think echo box insists that one must buy a plane ticket to Rome and nothing else may be mentioned.
The cost (Score:2)
Don't forget the energy and capital investments involved with the AI options. Those responses cost a thousand times as much as stack overflow queries. If and when the AI bubble bursts and the true cost is charged to the user instead of the venture capitalists, usage may change.
Thus no new content, AI & us descend to idiocr (Score:2)
ChatGPT loves to write code that doesn't work (Score:2)
Stack Overflow can be pretty annoying but usually you can find an answer with some decent Googling. Literally every time I've tried to use ChatGPT to answer a code question it has responded with incorrect information or invalid code. I've had it hallucinate what the client classes are for 3rd party libraries. It *looked* like something viable but it sure wasn't. It also just invents its own syntax for languages like terraform that isn't anywhere close to something that would ever work.
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A couple of notes:
* Provide the class def you want to work against in the prompt (internal or external). Tell it rather than relying on it's knowledge.
* Provide examples of the syntax.
* Unrelated - Copy/paste web content you want to ask about, do not assume it can access it.
* Unrelated - Put a "call to truth" at the top, mine is below.
Building up good prompts is the secret sauce. I almost always use an API so I can send 128k tokens in (but stick to under half of that). I'll include many files or parts of
Re: ChatGPT loves to write code that doesn't work (Score:3)
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"decline started in 2017" (Score:1)
Clickbait title? Like the post said, the decline started in 2017, alternatives like reddit were moving in, AI just added to the decline.
Well (Score:2)
Re:Well (Score:4, Interesting)
Chatgpt has basically been given a copy of the entire SO site to memorize and regurgitate, along with the copies of many other websites, all in the same place. Why would anyone using LLM ever bother going to any of those sites individually again?
That works up to the point SO dies due to lack of use, and then where are the training data going to come from for the next generation of LLMs? LLMs don't produce novel knowledge, they regurgitate and remix what they've ingested. If there are no experts being brought together to be humans with each other and post new Qs and As, then AI will be SOL.
The "AI revolution" is a fundamentally an extractive process. It is strip mining the collective expertise of knowledge workers and returning nothing. This only works once, after which the Internet will consist largely of a hollowed out wasteland of chatbots hallucinating at each other.
Re: Well (Score:2)
Technical archives degrade and not much value (Score:2)
Todays AI, pattern matching (Score:3)
What will the LLM's scrape in the future? (Score:1)
Honest question. A lot of value comes from the StackOverflow answers. When a new technology comes out, and most people have migrated to LLMs for answers, where will the LLMs get new answers? If people are not discussing it on StackOverflow and elsewhere, would it just be docs? That could be problematic, since docs can be sketchy or non-existent. Will StackOverflow still exist in a lesser capacity to get answers on the absolute latest technology?
Weird (Score:2)
Perhaps it didn't pay off to breed an elitist mod (Score:3)
Re: Perhaps it didn't pay off to breed an elitist (Score:2)
Move on To Whatever Works (Score:2)
duplicate (Score:2)
"This question is a duplicate of ." Maybe if you ask ChatGPT first, you don't ask a duplicate question?
It wouldn't be so bad for StackOverflow (Score:2)