Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around 50% of its traffic. This decline is similarly reflected in site usage, with approximately a 50% decrease in the number of questions and answers, as well as the number of votes these posts receive.
The charts below show the usage represented by a moving average of 49 days.
What happened?
and copilot and chatgpt give good enough answers without being unfriendly
I honestly believe people are way overvaluing the responses ChatGPT gives.
For a lot of boilerplating scenarios or trying to resolve some pretty standard stuff, it’s good.
I had an issue a while back with QueryDSL running towards an MSSQL instance, which I tried resolving by asking ChatGPT some pretty straightforward questions regarding the tool. Without going too much into detail, I basically got stuck in a loop where ChatGPT kept suggesting solutions that were not viable at all in QueryDSL. I pointed it out, trying to point out why what it did was wrong and it tried correcting itself suggesting the same broken solutions.
The AI is great until whatever it has been taught previously doesn’t cover your situation. My solution was a bit of digging in google away, which helpfully made me resolve the issue. But had I been stuck with only ChatGPT I’d still be going around in loops.
It really doesn’t work as a replacement for google/docs/forums. It’s another tool in your belt, though, once you get a good feel for its limitations and use cases; I think of it more like upgraded rubber duck debugging. Bad for getting specific information and fixes, but great for getting new perspectives and/or directions to research further.
I agree! It has been a great help in those cases.
I just don’t believe that it can fullfill the actual need for sites like StackOverflow. It probably never will be able to either, unless we manage to make it learn new stuff without reliable sources like SO, while also allowing it to snap up these obscure answers to problems without burying it in tons of broken solutions.
Exactly this. SO is now just a repository of answers that ChatGPT and it’s ilk can train against. A high percentage is questions that SO users need answers to are already asked and answered. New and novel problems arise so infrequently thanks to the way modern tech companies are structured that an AI that can read and train on the existing answers and update itself periodically is all most people need anymore… (I realize that was rambling, I hope it made sense)
So soon they will start responding with “this has been asked before, let’s change the subject”
🤣 🤣
Exactly! It will all come full circle
yes! this! is chatgpt intelligent: no! does it more often than not give good enough answers to daily but somewhat obscure ans specific programming questions: yes! is a person on SO intelligent: maybe. do they give good enough answers to daily but somewhat obscure ans specific programming questions: mostly
Its not great for complex stuff, but for quick questions if you are stuck. the answers are given quicker, without snark and usually work
A repository of often (or at least not seldom) outdated answers.
@focus Is that the reason why we get more and more AI written articles?
No, thats because of capitalism