this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Technology

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342
The Fall of Stack Overflow (observablehq.com)
submitted 1 year ago by trashhalo@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
263 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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?

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[–] jherazob@beehaw.org 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

It just invents the answer out of thin air, or worse, it gives you subtle errors you won't notice until you're 20 hours into debugging

[–] sanzky@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

so, like SO?

[–] Saauan@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I agree with you that it sometimes gives wrong answers. But most of the time, it can help better than StackOverflow, especially with simple problems. I mean, there wouldn't be such an exodus from StackOverflow if ChatGPT answers were so bad right ?

But, for very specific subjects or bizarre situations, it obviously cannot replace SO.

[–] jherazob@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

And you won't know if the answers it gave you are OK or not until too late, seems like the Russian Roulette of tech support, it's very helpful until it isn't

Depending on Eliza MK50 for tech support doesn't stop feeling absurd to me

[–] Mangosniper@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

How do you know the answer that gets copied from SO will not have any downsides later? Chatgpt is just a tool. I can hit myself in the face with a wrench as well, if I use it in a dumb way. IMHO the people that get bitten in the ass by chatgpt answers are the same that just copied SO code without even trying to understand what it is really doing...

[–] QHC@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

Sounds the same as believing a random stranger.

How many SO topics have you seen with only one, universally agreed upon solution?

[–] gapbetweenus@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago

Just like real humans.