Stack Overflow Is ChatGPT Casualty Traffic Down 14% in March
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ChatGPT is just the executioner. If people are abandoning ship in droves the moment an alternative becomes available, you know just how bad your platform is.
In ChatGPT i actually ask questions, get answer, and use its response to either refine my questions or look up documentation.
Since I know that ChatGPT can't really code, I use its responses as a hint. I leaned a lot when using it to explore the capabilities of languages and libraries I'm not that familiar with.
On SO, the opposite happens. I seldom ask questions, since the site has a reputation of being hostile. I look for previous answers and just try whatever answer I found on my code. If it doesn't work, I try looking for another answer, rinse and repeat.
I follow some SO tags where I have domain expertise (there's an RSS feed for each tag, so that's convenient). Often I remember having seen that answered before, so I copy the entire headline and paste it into google, and see a good answer somewhere on the first result page. My domain expertise enables me to pick it out from the other results quickly; the asker would probably need minutes, quite likely tens of minutes. What to do? I personally vote to close as duplicate, which is friendly to you and hostile to the people who asked without searching. What would ChatGPT do, though?
Based on a single experiment, it'll rephrase the top answer in a confident, friendly, patient, informative manner. But the top answer was wrong for that question, for reasons that require domain expertise to understand (a five-word phrase whose meaning isn't a minor variant of its three-word prefix), and ChatGPT's answer nebulised that difference.
I find ChatGTP to be very good at some things. I worry for sites like SO, though. SO's genius is to find a way to make answering worthwhile for people like me, not just for the people who'd like to ask questions and get free answer from someone with domain expertise. Replicating that two-sided model with an AI in the middle seems very, very difficult.
And for someone who asks and is curious about things, this is a godsend. I am using it as a learning tool, and some of its answers contained information that would take a long time for me to find myself, and it triggered me to look for actual tutorials and documentation that actually improved me as a developer.
You argue that SO makes answering worthwhile, but ChatGPT actually makes asking worthwhile.
And as a sidenote, I have expertise in a bunch of things, but I don't answer questions on SO, as I'm not interested in dealing with people interested in competing on it for internet points. I write tutorials on places like Medium or Hackernoon instead.
But it would be foolish to deny that this is a demographic that exists, with a lot of drama attached to it (e.g.: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/331513/lets-take-a-...)
Just the mention of "staff" and "power users" gives me the feeling that this is a place to avoid. I go there to fetch existing answers, and of none are found, I just go elsewhere.
This
How does an LLM with an LLM community solve that?
XY problems are common enough that people on SO often won't answer a question asking how to do Y until the submitter explains their X. If it turns out some Z is what the person really needs the answerers explain that and show how to do Z.
Great for the person who asked the question. They learn how to accomplish what they actually wanted.
But it sucks when I actually need to know how to do Y, and all searching SO turns up is those XY problems.
Even more annoying I'm pretty sure I've run into ones where someone who really needed to do Y asked, noting that previous questions about Y all failed to actually tell how to do Y, and their question was quickly closed as a duplicate of one of the earlier XY problems that doesn't actually tell how to do Y.
Also, SO is flawed that’s without a doubt, but it still even in the age of LLMs been really useful to answer questions that are somewhat tangential not pure code. I was having a problem with FairPlay DRM for live streaming with iOS 16 and SO had something to point me in the right direction. Chatgpt being trained on older data didn’t have the answer. What happens in the future???
Incorporating recent info into an LLM (fine tuning) is a solved problem.
Unfortunately, I can't think of a real-world example (library where ChatGPT has probably seen the documentation, but not any source code) to try out.
A well-trained language model only needs to be retrained when the language changes. New facts can be fed to the model by simply telling it about them, which is how those "plugins" work behind the scenes.
reddit discussion chains for chatgpt conversations
Joining across CSVs, complete with OP taking the inferior option: https://rentry.co/gse58
Different answers because of vague context on an NPE: https://rentry.co/dok7i
Closing down "How do I make a website" complete with passive aggressive commentary before a close: https://rentry.co/ysfe2
System prompt if you want to try it yourself: https://rentry.co/36e7u
Try asking a question along the lines of "why does this happen? see screenshot for details" with a text-only screenshot that uses three-point text as viewed by someone who matters. You'll have a different experience. Or try asking a question that's already well answered, and the answer could be found by searching for the headline of your new question.
The most amazing part of chat ai is its ability to be very convincing and yet factually incorrect. It doesn’t seem like it’s a secret that these chat apps spit out just plain wrong information routinely, I’m not sure why anyone would trust it with something important.
SO has bad info too, for sure, but part of SO is peer review to help feel that out. “AI” is a black box and not to be trusted.
If you publish on StackOverflow only for LLM to gobble it up and no human even sees the upvote button anymore… why would you? You are basically an unpaid ghost content producer for Microsoft/ClosedAI at this point.
Yes, they are tools, build by humans. But this doesn't mean humans can understand what, how, and why they are doing. Historically observations may take hundreds of years to explain.
I give it facts I want to see in prose, it gives me very neutral, inoffensive prose back. I always have to issue a few corrections to the prompt, and I always have to post edit, but it still saves me a huge amount of time and I don’t need to worry so much about bias leaking in and making anyone uncomfortable.
Someone will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. I know treason agains Friend Computer when I see it.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some hallways to paint red.
By the way low grade stuff doesn't mean a basic question, it just means a question that shows no effort made to read, comprehend, understand, research. Pretty sure I came out fair bit more resourceful and fluid-intelligent thanks to SO rules...
I leave chat groups with many people asking stupid low effort questions without using search or any research. Signal noise ratio, waste of time. But there are chat groups where low effort junk is moderated away, just like SO.
If you think a question if wasting your time, you can just ignore it.
The person asking the question most likely is not even aware that their question is shit.
ChatGPT is just a much better resource for it, especially considering that most likely it was trained on many SO answers already.
I actually use SO as you suggest. I don't ask questions, if what I want to know is not answered, I just go and find my answer elsewhere. In the desire yo not bother the "incredibly nice" people on SO, I just never engage with them. Can't really get more respectful than that. For all intents and purposes, I'm the perfect SO user.
ChatGPT, in that sense is an amazing learning tool. I learned more in a couple of months with it than in years of stumbling upon SO replies after searching stuff online. SO, on the other hand, is just about getting lucky in finding some old reply and the code snippet you found works, or move along in your search.
Hmm. Did I complain about it?
However, we are in a thread that eminently discusses how SO lost relevance I relation to ChatGPT as a tool used by developers. All my answers are framed in this context.
The comments leading up to my comment also didn't complain about ChatGPT, they all just piled on SO for no clear reason. Maybe you mixed up threads.
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I feel like someone could quickly build up a strong SO profile by taking the question, asking ChatGPT, validating it, then just copy/pasting.After the strange decision to split it into fiefdoms, with separate accounts and reputation, I rarely had enough points to contribute free feedback that may have saved someone’s day. I happen to know stuff on multiple topics, but it wasn’t wanted.
We should be glad all the code and advice has always been being scraped. It was all provided by community. This is probably a better outcome than just seeing a wrong answer about an obscure error code on 3 fake seo blogs.
Today, happens to be brisket. Last time, welding. Even when it’s all programming stuff, seems like I’m constantly being asked to take action before participating on the post.
(There have been so many worse ideas. I just hate that stuff.)
I don't see SO as just merely a repository. It's also a networking and collaborative channel, that may not be apparent to users who just drop by to get quick answers. The reduction of traffic would thus finally refocus SO back to this.
Perhaps the higher traffic in the past was from AI training bots, and now they're trained?
How are they going to train them for new tools?