• ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
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    5 days ago

    What made me stop is

    1. they allowed AI answers. Full stop, I don’t want AI regurgitating AI.

    2. They did nothing to improve the community except repeatedly say they’ll improve the community

    3. The barrier to entry is still way too high. You can’t post/comment without rep, but you can’t get rep without post/commenting. So people joining struggle to even say hello.

    As a engineer who was a power user on StackOverflow, I hate that we are losing a major community that helps coders, beginners or advance, ask questions.

    • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      They don’t allow AI answers though?

      Other than that, yeah I agree. They needed to switch to curating their content and helping their community and they didn’t.

    • SuperSaiyanSwag@lemmy.zip
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      5 days ago

      It’s terrible, I will literally see an answer that is telling me to do something that is straight up not an option or a function available to me. So obvious when people use ai generated answers.

    • zante@slrpnk.net
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      5 days ago

      Kind of what happens when you build community, then try to scale for profit.

  • jo3rn@discuss.tchncs.de
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    5 days ago

    This graph is misinformation

    Although we have seen a small decline in traffic, in no way is it what the graph is showing (which some have incorrectly interpreted to be a 50% or 35% decrease). This year [2023], overall, we’re seeing an average of ~5% less traffic compared to 2022.

  • faltryka@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    So what do we train gpt on when stack overflow degrades?

    Will library docs be enough? Maybe.

    • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      SO is already degraded because they didn’t allow new answers even though the old answers are based on old depreciated versions and no longer relevant.

    • jacksilver@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      This has been a concern of mine for a long time. People act like docs and code bases are enough, but it’s obvious when looking up something niche that it isn’t. These models need a lot of input data, and we’re effectively killing the source(s) of new data.

      • faltryka@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        It feels like less stack overflow is a narrowing, and that’s kind of where my question comes from. The remaining content for training is the actual authoritative library documentation source material. I’m not sure that’s necessarily bad, it’s certainly less volume, but it’s probably also higher quality.

        I don’t know the answer here, but I think the situation is a lot more nuanced than all of the black and white hot takes.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      There’s a serious argument that StackOverflow was, itself, a patch job in a technical environment that lacked good documentation and debug support.

      I’d argue the mistake was training on StackExchange to begin with and not using an actual stack of manuals on proper coding written by professionals.

      The problem was never having the correct answer but sifting out of the overall pool of information. When ChatGPT isn’t hallucinating, it does that much better than Stack Exchange

  • neatchee@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Stack Overflow mods finally get what they’ve always dreamed of: no more repeat questions.

    StackGPT: begins every answer with “closed as duplicate. Here’s a previous answer I provided to this question…”

  • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net
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    5 days ago

    Well, having a crawler search through all that garbage, ads, questions, wrong answers. And converting that to facts or condensed information…

    Just makes so much more sense, also for the environment, I would think. It saves a ton of useless traffic.

    But the “AI” part may be problematic.

  • marcos@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    The ChatGPT release is close to the SO decision to double down on the moderating rules.

    Anyway, where is this data from? This change looks suspiciously intense.

  • ObsidianZed@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Not that I doubt people have been avoiding it since ChatGPT, but i6 think a part of it is also Google’s partnership with Reddit pushing more search results that way. I’d be curious to see a similar trend regarding Reddit.