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Programming AI

StackOverflow Usage Plummets as AI Chatbots Rise (devclass.com) 45

Posted by msmash from the tough-luck dept.
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.

StackOverflow Usage Plummets as AI Chatbots Rise More | Reply

StackOverflow Usage Plummets as AI Chatbots Rise

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  • May the best AI win. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ostracus ( 1354233 ) on Friday January 10, 2025 @12:38PM (#65078377) Journal

    Maybe because AI gives better answers than stack overflow.

    • Re:May the best AI win. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by adonoman ( 624929 ) on Friday January 10, 2025 @12:44PM (#65078395)
      And ChatGPT won't refuse to answer claiming that you're asking a duplicate question and pointing you at some unrelated question from 5 years ago on a different platform that wasn't answered in the first place.
      • And AI won't call you an idiot and tell you to read the F manual.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by KlomDark ( 6370 )
        Exactly, I haven't wasted my time attempting to post a question on there in years. Always assholes and pointing to irrelevant answers, along with the hyper-annoying "Why would you want to do it that way?" responses that get immediately ignored.

        • 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)

      by cob666 ( 656740 ) on Friday January 10, 2025 @01:02PM (#65078451)

      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!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by allo ( 1728082 )

        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.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hjf ( 703092 )

      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.

      • 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.

    • 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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by allo ( 1728082 )

      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.

    • ....becauuuse...
      the AI was trained on the StackOverflow code?
    • Most of the answers are from stack flow, just jumbled up.

    • AI was trained on StackOverflow. Surely, garbage in, garbage out?

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AvitarX ( 172628 )

      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).

      • 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!

  • Once all the questions are answered... (Score:3)

    by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Friday January 10, 2025 @12:49PM (#65078413) Homepage
    There is nothing left to ask, visitors just look up the already answered question on the same StackOverflow site. Think about it, eventually all the answers are already answered, why would anyone ask it again?

    Their business model only has continual engagement if they let previous questions expire... and remove them so someone has to answer again.

  • Symbiotic Condition Applies (Score:3)

    by willkane ( 6824186 ) on Friday January 10, 2025 @01:00PM (#65078445)

    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.

    • 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

  • 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.

  • Since people aren't going to stackoverflow to ask & answer questions, the answers won't be as easily found, causing the AI to slowly become dumber and dumber. The "answers" it gives will make less sense and be increasingly outright wrong. At least, given the current level of chatgpt/AI technology. It won't get better until it actually understands -- and right now it's on borrowed time stealing the understanding from others. When we stop feeding the AI with answers, it will only be as dumb as we are

  • 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.

    • 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

  • Clickbait title? Like the post said, the decline started in 2017, alternatives like reddit were moving in, AI just added to the decline.

  • 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?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by flink ( 18449 )

      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 onl

  • I spend more time sifting through obsolete information now than I did in the past. I can enter targeted queries (red hat 9, debian 11-12) and I have to wade through the past.
  • is being trained on increasingly bad data. The internet is flooded with obsolete and bad data. Is it any wonder today's advance pattern matching(pretend AI) is flaky.

  • 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?

  • It's been my observation that AI looks like it is generally pimping answers found on stackoverflow.
  • You cannot post this, read that rule there you newb, let me close this question because it is orthodoxically not suppised to be there even though it has 500 upvotes, or let me move it to a substack that is visites by literally 5 people where nobody will read it... I have contributed to stackoverflow actively for 3 yeara but then it became so toxic i stopped going there because it felt really bad

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