Death by LLM: Stack Overflow's decline, and its plan to survive, shows the future of free online data in an AI world

@floofloof@lemmy.ca · 2 years ago

Death by LLM: Stack Overflow's decline, and its plan to survive, shows the future of free online data in an AI world

@itchy_lizard@feddit.it · edit-2 2 years ago

God the narrative of Business Insider is gross.

The only thing making SO decline is that they have a CEO. And that CEO is trying to “compete”.

Just keep being a great platform for Q&A and stop chasing profits. People prefer SO because the ansewrds are trustworthy. LLMs will always bullshit you and never be better than a platform free of AI crap.

@Klame@lemmy.ml · 2 years ago

Also, LLMs are trained on SO data. It remains a staple for coding, LLMs just reinforced that.

@mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works · 2 years ago

I agree. That being said, there is some majorly bad answers on stack overflow. 9 times out of 10 I get wrong answers, and one time I was looking for a solution in Arduino and someone answered in Javascript for some reason.

@floofloof@lemmy.ca · edit-2 2 years ago

The decline has accelerated since the release of ChatGPT, which suggests there may be a connection, especially given ChatGPT’s ability to answer many coding questions.

Stack Overflow posts, 2018-23:

Stack Overflow's decline in posts accelerates in 2023

Source

ChatGPT traffic, 2022-23:

ChatGPT's rise in traffic in 2023

Source

@recycledbits@discuss.tchncs.de · 2 years ago

SO’s attempts at bolting some kind of AI into their site have been a great source of entertainment:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425162/we-are-seeking-functional-feedback-for-the-formatting-assistant